CITIZEN: Beating the Heat
New York and Baltimore are handing out free air conditioners to low-income seniors most at risk of heat-related illness and Covid-19. Why isn't Philly doing the same?
a Philadelphia Citizen feature
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As Philadelphia swelters under a relentless wave of dangerous daily heat, many sweaty, suffocating and stressed Philadelphians are forced on a desperate citywide hunt for locations, buses and subway trains to cool down in.
Philly’s not the only place where that’s happening. Such scenes are playing out in a number of major urban centers with large vulnerable populations without access to air conditioning.
As heat waves intensify, it’s become commonplace for cities to issue “Code Red” days in tandem with “Extreme Heat” warnings from forecasters. That’s followed by a now-normal routine of “cooling centers,” typically municipal-controlled public spaces with central air where residents can escape the hot weather and find reprieve under an AC vent or refresh next to a fan.
Setting up a cooling center infrastructure during a pandemic, however, is clearly problematic these days. In response to this month’s heat wave, the City set up 10 cooling centers around Philly, which included some schools, libraries and parked SEPTA buses. Clearly, that is not enough—as this WHYY article noted last week, none of those centers are in Hunting Park, which may register temperatures up to 20 degrees higher than some other parts of the city, or in South Philly, where Point Breeze is a dangerous urban heat island.
And, so, Philly’s most distressed residents must resort to doing it the usual Philly hard way: leaving their homes, in some cases dragging their kids along with them, in oppressive and life-threatening heat on an epic quest for a cool spot that they can sit in for a limited amount of time.
Read the full piece HERE …
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