It's Hot, Hot, Hot
“Some people change their ways when they see the light;
others when they feel the heat”- Caroline Schoeder
What is the deadliest type of natural disaster? A supernova as pictured yesterday would top the list by frying the entire planet but we should be safe from that for several billion years. Other obvious candidates include hurricanes, massive earthquakes, and tidal waves. Hurricane Katrina may have killed 1700 people directly with a total of 4000 deaths if you include secondary causes. And yet according to a new book called "Hot Time in the Old Town" by professor Edward P. Kohn, the deadliest type of natural disaster in America is heat waves.
"We all enjoyed pictures of children playing in fountains and eating ice cream. To the media, a heat wave means a holiday. This obscures the sinister fact that heat waves are this country’s number one natural disaster killer. On average, heat kills more Americans than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined. "This summer Russian had a terrible heat wave that caused forest fires and burned wheat fields. American TV showed pictures of a smoke-choked Moscow but news agencies failed to mention the death count. The Moscow city government reported a doubling of deaths during the heat wave; every day three hundred additional people died over a period of several weeks. This quickly adds up to a catastrophe.
The 1896 heat wave in New York City killed as many as thirteen hundred people who literally roasted to death in brick buildings. The media and the government basically ignored the emergency. The one person who took action was a young Theodore Roosevelt, President of the Board of Police Commissioners, who distributed free ice to the poor. No one learned anything from this and history continued to repeat itself. In 1972 as many as nine hundred people died during a New York heat wave. The 1995 Chicago heat wave killed seven hundred, while a 2003 European heat wave killed over 50,000.
Bottom Line
Perhaps it was the 2003 European disaster that finally convinced cities to take heat waves seriously.
Today, most cities have heat wave response plans in place even before summer arrives. Emergency cooling centers are set up in local community centers, and officials check on the elderly and chronically ill through phone calls and home visits.For more information on the risks of extreme heat check out these prior blog posts:
2009/07/greenhouse-effect-in-cars
2009/07/exercising-on-hot-days
2009/07/extreme-heat
2008/08/heat-exhaustion
2008/08/hyperthermia (note: hyper not hypo)
Labels: Heat, Heat Exhaustion, Heat Stroke, Public Health
posted by Gary W Kibble at
1:00 AM
3 Comments:
The Cato-at-liberty article cited above in the comment makes an interesting observation,
"despite the hoopla about natural weather disasters, they contribute less than 0.06% to the annual U.S. death toll!"
I am a little skeptical of the notion that, “the deadliest type of natural disaster in America is heat waves.”
As shown in Figure 6 of the paper, “Deaths and Death Rates from Extreme Weather Events: 1900-2008,” Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 14 (4): 102-09 (2009), at http://www.jpands.org/vol14no4/goklany.pdf, extreme cold kills many more people directly than extreme heat.
Second, if one looks at the average daily deaths in the US (and other parts of the developed world), then many more deaths occur during the winter months than during other parts of the year. Figure 2 in "Global public health: Global warming in perspective. Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons," 14 (3): 69-75 (2009), at http://www.jpands.org/vol14no3/goklany.pdf, shows that on average, there were 95,000 excess deaths during the winter months (average for 2001-07). This far exceeds any due to heat waves – which is not surprising since chronic conditions frequently kill more than extreme conditions.
These two papers can be accessed via my website at GOKLANY dot COM. Also, you can access a compilation of excess winter deaths for a number of developed countries at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/06/winter-kills-excess-deaths-in-the-winter-months/. It estimates that there were 108,500 excess winter deaths in the US in 2008; 36,700 in England and Wales in the winter of 2009-2010; 5,600 in Canada (2006); 7,000 in Australia (1997-2006 Average); and so forth.
To Indur Goklany,
I appreciate the links to your studies. Very informative and interesting. As you stated, the data reveals extreme cold as a major killer with extreme heat a distant second; yet both far ahead of other natural disasters.
Would you agree that governments should spend more time and resources on eductating the public about the dangers of extreme temperature and less on rarer incidents like hurricanes, nuclear power plants, terrorism, etc?
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