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Blame this summer’s weather on whatever you want: Global warming, the impending apocalypse, a Democratic President, a Republican Congress, a surprisingly moderate Supreme Court, or the fact that the Miami Heat won the NBA championship.
Whatever the case, the inclement weather has become a dangerous summer fling.
Freakish summer thunderstorms have caused a dozen deaths, and counting.
Out of control fires have threatened 20,000 homes throughout Colorado.
Power outages are wreaking havoc on a population scrambling to stay cool in triple-digit heat waves.
Even some of our most popular social media and entertainment sites were affected when a storm knocked Netflix, Instagram, and Pinterest offline.
Lives, homes, and air conditioning have become the casualties of a summer gone mad. And being unable to post a photo on Instagram will make any social media enthusiast mad. Crazy mad.
Nearly every summer, however, our country endures extreme conditions. From fires to heat waves, from tropical storms to power outages.
Remember when the whole Northeast, and parts of Canada, endured a massive power outage in the summer of 2003? Or the 1995 Chicago heat wave that killed more than 700 people?
Everyone knows that, in these inclement conditions, the sick, the elderly, and the poor suffer most. They also account for most of the casualties.
It just makes sense. If I am housed, and a heat wave shuts down my air conditioner, I can find other ways to stay cool or temporarily go somewhere that still has electricity. If my house burns down from a raging fire, I typically have the wherewithal to rebuild.
But those who have no homes, and who lack the revenue to even shelter themselves in an air-conditioned movie theater or shopping mall for a few hours, have limited options.
Local city workers are setting up “cooling centers” to help those who are homeless, but they are just temporary respites from extreme conditions.
Isn’t homelessness, living stranded on the streets of America, extreme enough?
It doesn’t matter if this country is enduring a wickedly frozen winter or a fiery hot summer, those living on the streets are constantly struggling with extreme conditions that could kill them.
It’s time to put the heat on our political leaders to protect people who are homeless from extreme conditions, 365 days per year, by building enough affordable housing.
Photo by Karl Gehring, The Denver Post.
2 Comments
One major problem I have during periods of extreme heat is common among both the homeless and those housed but too poor to afford A/C. Both the abandoned shed I usually sleep in and the older, under-ventilated and often overcrowded brick rowhouses that make up a large part of the housing of those living at or below the poverty line here in Baltimore Md. are basically heat sinks that soak up and hold, (often for days after the heat wave ends) the heat until they resemble a sauna. This can make it impossible to sleep, again often for days.
This lack of sleep affects people in ways ranging from direct to indirect, the obvious health and safety dangers of a cumulative lack of sleep to ending up as targets or victims of other's anger, frustration, & rage brought on by the same.
As for the cooling centers while they do help and can save lives, they can also become a powder keg of collected frustration and aggravation, ready to explode at the merest slight, real or imagined, as soon as people get back out in the heat
The thing is there are a whole lot of vacant houses in America, some of them are owned by banks determined to get their pound of flesh from people who had jobs when they took out the loan – before the inevitable implosion of the housing market bubble took out the rest of the economy but that, in my uneducated opinion, is what happens when people who have WAY more than enough are focused on accumulating more than WAY more than enough, and are willing to trample down people who do not have nearly enough, to get WAY WAY more than enough. Mean while there is plenty of work in this country and plenty of resources in this country, and there is no real good excuse for half the country being in poverty. we can turn empty retail , and industrial spaces into low income housing. We can plant trees in cities to cool the heat sinks, and we can plant back yard gardens, nurture them with compost made from household waste to ease hunger and the pressures on urban waste management, and we can lift the restrictions that prohibit the home owners, and renters for selling produce grown in their own back yards, and goods made in their own home, instead of looking to the government to fix the problem of homelessness we should be demanding the government get out of the way and allow citizens to find a creative solution to the problems.