Phoenix Heat Deaths Rose by 1,000 Percent in 10 Years

“Relentless heat led to 645 deaths last year in Maricopa County, the most ever documented in Arizona’s biggest metropolitan area,” reports Ariel Wittenberg in Politico. That amounts to a 1,000 percent increase in the last decade, growth attributed to longer, more intense heat waves coupled with rising eviction rates that put more Phoenix residents outdoors and at risk.

According to Wittenberg, “Almost half of the victims last year were homeless — 290 people. Twenty died at bus stops, others were in tents, and an unrecorded number of people were found on the pavement, prone as if on a baking stone.”

The city is using federal funding to operate cooling centers with longer hours, but these lifelines face an uncertain future when those funds run out. “With no stable federal funding, the location of cooling centers and bottled water distribution points changes each year, depending on whether fleeting resources will be provided by the city, county or state. Churches and local charities supplement government aid with their own donations of water and cool spaces,” Wittenberg explains.

While some city councilors don’t want to see resources used to assist unhoused people, Phoenix is one of the cities that is — by necessity — taking extreme heat seriously as a public health hazard, creating a new city office to spearhead heat mitigation strategies. At the state level, an Extreme Heat Preparedness Plan resulted in a new statewide cooling center coordinator and a chief heat officer.