California's October heat wave proves cities fail the vulnerable
By Josie Calloway · Reporting from Pittsburgh ·
The people who will die in this heat are not the ones reading the weather app. They are the ones living on the asphalt of Los Angeles and the laborers in the inland valleys. This October heat wave is not just a weather event. It is a failure of urban planning that treats shade as a luxury instead of a right. When a city leaves over 45,000 unhoused people exposed to triple-digit heat, the heat is not the only thing that is dangerous. The negligence is.
The clinical reality of the burn
The numbers are not just records; they are triggers for organ failure. According to 10News.com, San Diego hit 105 degrees. Vista hit 108 degrees. The Los Angeles Times reports that downtown Los Angeles is sweltering too.
For a healthy person, this is a nuisance. For a patient with respiratory issues or an elderly person in a non-cooled apartment, it is a crisis. I have seen this in the ER. Heat exhaustion turns into heat stroke. Then comes the acute kidney injury and the electrolyte imbalance.
The danger is compounded by the wind. 10News.com reports Santa Ana gusts could reach 45 mph. This dries out the land and feeds fires. The Bouquet fire in the Angeles National Forest is already burning.
A lid on the region
This is not a random spike. It is a mechanism. The National Weather Service describes ridges of high air pressure. This is the same mechanism as the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome. In both cases, a stationary high-pressure system traps extreme heat and blocks cooling winds. It turns a region into an oven.
The 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome showed us what happens when a population is unprepared for sudden, extreme heat. Systems fail. People die. We are seeing the same atmospheric "lid" settle over Southern California. The Guardian reports that these heatwaves become more likely and longer with every half-degree of global warming.
The long record tells us that high-pressure ridges are not "unprecedented." They are a known risk. What is unprecedented is the insistence that we can keep building concrete jungles without providing basic cooling infrastructure for the poorest zip codes.
The myth of the rare event
The ablest advocates for the status quo will call this a "rare" event. V Kelly Turner of UCLA noted that the temperatures on October 2 were rare. They argue that you cannot build a city for a one-in-a-hundred-year heat wave. They say the cost of universal shade and cooling centers is too high for a temporary spike.
That argument is a lie. David Neelin of UCLA states that a warmer climate adds to the probability and duration of these heatwaves. This is not a fluke. It is the new baseline. When the "rare" event happens every few years, it is no longer rare. It is a predictable failure.
Edith de Guzman of UCLA says providing more shade is the most effective way to keep people safe. Yet, the dossier shows Los Angeles remains a sprawling metropolis of heat-absorbing surfaces. The city prioritizes the flow of traffic over the survival of the 45,000 people living on its streets.
Emergency rooms in Los Angeles and San Diego will soon see a sharp spike in admissions. We will see the same surge of pediatric asthma attacks and respiratory distress that hit during the September 2020 California wildfire crisis. The high pressure traps ozone and smoke at ground level. The poorest breathe the sickest air.
The system is designed to protect the people who can afford air conditioning. It ignores the outdoor worker and the unhoused person until they arrive in the ER with a core temperature of 104 degrees. We are trading human lives for the convenience of poor urban planning. Until shade is treated as essential infrastructure, these heat waves will continue to be mass-casualty events.