Thousands of homeless people in Phoenix, Arizona are struggling to stay alive as the summer’s triple-digit temperatures arrive.
Temperatures rose to 114 degrees earlier this month, making it one of the hottest summers ever recorded.
”During the summer, it’s pretty hard to find a place at night that’s cool enough to sleep without the police running you off,” Chris Medlock, a homeless Phoenix man known as ”T-Bone,” told the Associated Press.
Medlock carries everything he owns in a small backpack and often sleeps in a park or a nearby desert preserve to avoid large crowds.
”If a kind soul could just offer a place on their couch indoors, maybe more people would live,” he said at a dining room where homeless people can find shade and get a free meal.
This comes after 339 people have died from heat-related causes in Phoenix last year, including 130 homeless people.
”If 130 homeless people were dying in any other way it would be considered a mass casualty event,” Kristie L. Ebi, a professor of global health at the University of Washington, told the news outlet.
To prevent deaths this summer, officials and advocates in Phoenix have recently opened a 200-bed shelter for homeless people.
”It can be rough,” said 34-year-old Mac Maistold, one of the first to move into the shelter. ”I stay in the shelters or anywhere I can find. Here, I can actually rest, work on job applications, stay out of the heat.”
According to the AP, more weather-related deaths are caused by excessive heat in the U.S. than flooding, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined, and heat waves have become more frequent and more extreme as climate change drives rising temperatures nearly everywhere.
”As temperatures continue to rise across the U.S. and the world, cities like Seattle, Minneapolis, New York, or Kansas City that don’t have the experience or infrastructure for dealing with heat have to adjust as well,” Climate scientist David Hondula told the news outlet.
Advocates said that heat contributes to about 1,500 deaths every year across the country and about half of heat-related deaths are homeless people.
