Good morning. Wendy Cox in Vancouver here.
After a cold, slow and wet spring, British Columbia this week started getting summer-like weather. This weekend, temperatures are expected to reach 29 C on Sunday and Monday in Vancouver. In Lytton, the heat is expected to hit 35 C on Tuesday before rain sets in and cools everything down.
The warming weather carries a dark overtone of exactly a year ago. Mindful of last year’s heat dome that claimed 619 lives, the City of Vancouver this week held a news conference to warn about the heat and the Vancouver Coastal Health authority issued information about how to avoid the heat and spot signs of people in heat distress.
The current expected temperatures are a far cry from last year when the heat dome settled onto British Columbia, pushing temperatures well into the 30s in the Lower Mainland and into the 40s in parts of the Okanagan and in the interior. Lytton shattered a Canadian heat record, reaching 49.6 on June 29. The next day, the community burned to the ground.
Earlier this month, a coroner’s death review panel found the vast majority of those who died were vulnerable people living alone without air conditioning and with some health challenges. The panel recommended, among other things, that the B.C. government, by Dec. 1, conduct a review into issuing cooling devices as medical equipment accessible to people most at risk of dying during an extreme heat event.
That timeline won’t be helpful should the mercury climb even higher this summer. As Andrea Woo reports, air conditioning is not a common feature of most households in the Lower Mainland. A 2020 BC Hydro survey found only 36 per cent of customers in the region where the majority of heat deaths occurred had some type of air conditioning, such as a central air conditioning system, portable or window air conditioners, or heat pumps.
This compared to 70 per cent in the Southern Interior, 33 per cent on Vancouver Island and 25 per cent in northern B.C.
The generally mild weather along the coast has meant air conditioning hasn’t been a must-have feature for most homeowners: Seattle’s rate is only a bit higher at 44 per cent.
Still, Seattle and Portland are ahead of British Columbia in terms of ensuring the most vulnerable have access to air conditioning.
Andrea writes that in the weeks after the deadly heat wave last year, staff from the Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund program reached out to housing providers, community organizations and tenant advocates to learn hard lessons in how to better prepare for another extreme heat event like the one that killed more than 100 people in Oregon.
Across dozens of groups, the staffers heard similar requests for cooling devices to protect the city’s most vulnerable. By the fall, the group convened a heat response program and sought equipment-purchasing and community-distribution partners. Earlier this month, contractors with the program installed a portable air conditioner in a Portland home free of charge – the first of an expected 15,000 over the next five years, including about 3,000 units this summer.
Magan Reed, public information manager for the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, said the community groups had identified the cooling devices as an emergency response to a crisis that disproportionately impacted elderly and low-income people.
“And so this heat response program, from conception to launch, was built in about six months – which, for government, is extremely speedy,” she said.
The U.S. also has the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, administered by state social-service agencies, which assists low-income families with paying energy bills, covering energy-related home repairs and weatherizing their homes.
Brian Sarensen, the program’s manager in Washington, said the program has traditionally been used for heating assistance in his state, but that is now changing.
“Last year, we had over 100 people pass away from heat-related stress, many of them vulnerable populations, elderly, those with disabilities and low income. That was not something that should have happened,” he said.
“So we took the idea to core leadership, submitted a request to [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] to make adjustments to our plan, and they allowed us to. So this program year, we’ve offered air conditioning as part of our energy assistance program for the very first time.”
B.C.’s Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction said in a statement that it already has a program through which, in extraordinary circumstances, British Columbians on income assistance can receive an unspecified amount of “crisis supplement” funding for things such as purchasing a fan during a heat wave. Asked how many people accessed this funding for a cooling device last summer, or ever, a ministry spokesperson said in an e-mail that there was no way to track crisis supplement funding related specifically to weather or cooling devices.
Rowan Burdge, provincial director of the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition, who sat on the coroner’s panel, said the Dec. 1 deadline needs to be moved up.
“I think we need to be fast-tracking that and making sure that’s an acceptable benefit for people this summer, because we’re worried about heat events happening sooner than December and there really isn’t any infrastructure in place at this point to support people,” she said.
This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief James Keller. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.