KUOW73%
Five years after the dome: Washington remains vulnerable to extreme heat 20%
By John Ryan0%
6/29/2026, 2:34:43 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 29 faulty reasoning types, including Ambiguity (Equivocation), Anecdotal, and Appeal to Emotion, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 22.4% saturation with 382 hits. Analysis detected 2,383 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,706 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 34.4% and a BS Rank of 20% (17,609 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 80.50% of the article peer group.
Five years after a record-shattering heat wave hit the Pacific Northwest, killing an estimated 1,200 people in British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington, the region is somewhat more prepared to handle extreme heat.
But a million people in the Seattle metropolitan area alone may remain vulnerable to lethal temperatures at home or at work.
Extreme heat kills more Americans each year than any other natural disaster.
Lasting about a week, the late June 2021 heat dome was Washington’s deadliest weather disaster.
It delivered the highest temperatures ever recorded in Oregon (119°F), Washington (120°F), and Canada (121°F).
As the world’s climate keeps warming due to fossil-fuel pollution, the Pacific Northwest as well as the rest of the world can expect more heat waves—and more deaths.
Health-care experts say such deaths are preventable, especially with better support systems for the most vulnerable, including the very old, the very young, people without air-conditioning, and people who work or live outdoors.
Here’s a look at some local efforts to make our next heat wave less deadly.
Cool to the core
One of modern medicine’s most effective technologies for saving lives from extreme heat is the simple ice cube.
Big hospitals like Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center have high-tech equipment designed to quickly lower an overheated patient’s core body temperature.
But sometimes, nothing works faster than covering a patient in ice—often with the patient inside a body bag.
“Often our best tool to cool somebody off is just ice to their bodies,” said Arvin Akhavan, medical director for Harborview Medical Center’s emergency department.
”It's ridiculously simple that we just cool them off.”
Hooking a patient up to a cooling machine or inserting a cooling catheter into their veins can rapidly cool the patient’s core but can take time to get started.
“Every minute that they're hot, the risk that they die increases,” Akhavan said.
Inside the massive walk-in freezer at Harborview Medical Center’s cafeteria, the rows of shelves hold bags of ice as well as frozen foods.
"The moment we got the medic call that someone was coming in with concern for heat exhaustion, we'd be going to the cafeteria and getting them to prepare us ice to place on the patient," Akhavan said.
In June 2021, as temperatures passed 100 day after day, Western Washington hospitals learned some hard lessons: Make sure you have enough ice and body bags on hand, and make sure hospitals are talking to each other.
Areas like South King County had many more heat victims than the cooler, shadier parts of Seattle.
Akhavan showed me Harborview’s “radio room,” filled with phones and two-way radios.
A request for a chest X-ray blared over one of the radios while we spoke.
“In a disaster scenario, this would be the room that we stand up to help coordinate where patients would go,” Akhavan said.
A patient suffering from heat exhaustion and dehydration receives an intravenous drip of saline solution in the emergency room of UW Medical Center – Northwest in Seattle on July 27, 2022.
The name on her wristband has been digitally obscured.
During the 2021 heat dome, hospitals in Everett and Renton were swamped by patients with heat exhaustion and heat stroke.
One hospital nearly ran out of ice.
Another had to cancel elective procedures.
“About every 15 minutes they were getting somebody who was severely, severely hyperthermic,” said Steve Mitchell, interim chair of the emergency medicine department at the University of Washington.
“They just couldn't keep up with that demand because nobody was organizing the distribution of the Medic One units that were going to the hospitals.”
Health officials say since then, the region has beefed up its cooperation between hospitals, though federal funding for that cooperation evaporated in 2024.
“We all coordinate together to load-balance and distribute patients who are coming into the ER setting,” Mitchell said.
The Washington Medical Coordination Center, created in response to the Covid pandemic to keep individual institutions from being overwhelmed by patient volumes, also helped hospitals statewide respond to other disasters.
The Coordination Center disbanded in 2025 after losing its federal funding.
Mitchell said, even with the center gone, he expected hospitals would still be able to do a good job of distributing heat victims, at least within the most populated counties around Puget Sound, in the next big heat emergency.
“We learned so much with the last heat dome,” he said.
Of course, prevention is better than cure.
Experts say the region’s bigger challenge is to keep people from being hurt by heat in the first place.
Cooling the indoors
The Northwest has historically lacked air conditioning.
The region basically didn’t need it, at least west of the Cascades, where mild summers were the norm.
All that has changed.
Kim Virant got air conditioning after she and her dog had to flee their apartment in Shoreline in the heat dome.
“I’m relieved and thankful to have the A/C but also bummed out that you have to get it and that things have changed,” Virant told KUOW in 2024.
“And I think after that 2021, it was that realization that it's never going to be what it was before."
The share of Seattle-area homes with air conditioning has nearly doubled in less than a decade, according to U.S. census data.
The latest U.S.
Census Bureau data, from 2023, shows 64% of homes in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan area with air conditioning, up from 34 % in 2015.
Still, that leaves a million people or more, especially renters and those with lower incomes, living in what can become dangerously hot homes.
CM Heating technician Saul Benitez installs an electric heat pump in Shoreline, Washington, on July 28, 2023.
The city of Seattle has subsidized or given away heat pumps to about 5,000 homes, mostly those of low-income residents, since 2021.
The two-way devices very efficiently pump heat out of a building in the summer and into it in the winter.
The Washington Department of Commerce has provided free or discounted air conditioners to nearly 24,000 homes since the heat dome.
Seattle also has more cooling centers, such as community centers and public libraries with air conditioning, than it did five years ago.
Seattle Parks and Recreation has added air conditioning to six community centers since 2021, while five Seattle Public Library locations have installed air conditioning since then.
Officials predict every library will have air conditioning by the end of 2027.
In Oregon, state agencies have installed more than 8,000 heat pumps and 11,000 emergency air conditioners, and the Portland Clean Energy Fund, paid for by a 1% sales tax on large retailers, has installed 22,000 air-conditioning units to low-income homes since 2022.
But many Northwesterners don’t have the option of staying in air-conditioned space.
Surviving the outdoors
Working or living on dark surfaces like pavement or asphalt shingles exposes people to some of the region’s highest temperatures.
“If it's 100 degrees outside, it's probably 120 degrees on that roof, and if these guys and ladies are doing torch-down and hot tar roofing, could be even hotter than that,” said Richard Geyer with Roofers Union Local 153 in Tacoma.
Fifty Washington state workers received worker-compensation payments for suffering heat-related illnesses on the job in June 2021, three times the normal amount for June.
Construction workers and farmworkers suffered the most, according to the Department of Labor and Industries.
Washington put new protections for outdoor workers in place in 2023.
When temperatures hit 90°F, workers must get a 10-minute cool-down rest period every two hours.
At or above 100°F, a 15-minute cool-down period per hour is required.
Researchers say it’s too soon to tell whether the requirements for rest breaks, water, and shade have made a difference.
Geyer said roofers have been taking care of themselves in the heat long before the state got involved.
“ My contractors, they look ahead.
We see the weather forecast, and they plan accordingly,” he said.
“Days like today, my contractors will let my crew start early.
They will start at 5 a.m. and off at 1 p.m. to beat the heat.”
Neighbors in need
Unlike most weather disasters, where impacts are painfully obvious, extreme heat often kills silently.
Victims are often found, too late, alone in their home, motor vehicle, or on the sidewalk.
“It kills more people and harms more people, and it's one of those silent issues where it kind of creeps up on you.
It's not like thunderstorms or tornadoes or hurricanes or flooding that you can see,” said King County Emergency Management Director Brendan McCluskey.
Homeless people are especially vulnerable to death by overheating.
An infrared image of a homeless camp on Portland's Lloyd Avenue on June 28, 2021, shows surface temperatures ranging from 110F (purple) to 163F (white).
A spokesperson for the King County Regional Homelessness Authority declined to respond to KUOW’s information requests on the agency’s actions during a brief heat wave in early June by publication deadline.
Emergency managers say a big part of their work is letting people know that a dangerous heat wave is on the way and what they can do to keep themselves and others safe.
King County now has a heat emergency plan, with protocols for getting quickly into emergency mode, standing up cooling centers and outreach to homeless camps before a heat wave hits.
“Five years ago, it was in an experimental stage,” McCluskey said.
“It has since been rolled out nationally and using a lot of the information that we gleaned from the heat dome.”
McCluskey said government can’t do it all in a big emergency.
“In situations like that, you check on your friends and neighbors, especially those who are elderly or might need some extra assistance,” he said.
The odds of another heat wave striking the region keep rising along with concentrations of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Since June 2021, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have risen another 3%, from 419 to 432 parts per million.
The sky now holds about 54% more carbon dioxide than it did before the industrial revolution.
Climate scientists say the most important step to save lives from worsening heat waves, in the Northwest or anywhere, is to end pollution from fossil fuels.
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