Heat Waves Are The "Neutron Bomb" Of Weather Disasters

Heat waves are the neutron bomb of weather disasters.
They don't cause much damage, but they are the 
biggest weather killer out there.e 

 The big heat wave that's expected to build the eastern United States - including Vermont - and southeastern Canada is already being described as "dangerous" and "deadly" 

For good reason.

Heat waves are indeed deadly and dangerous, which is why the weather community makes a big deal out of warning the public often dismisses  as "just some hot days, it's summer."

Heat waves are the neutron bomb of weather disasters. Unlike hurricanes, tornadoes and floods, hot weather doesn't cause a lot of property damage. Oh sure, some concrete heaves on a highway here, a railroad track bends a little. 

But heat waves don't provide the super dramatic images that attract eyeballs and clicks to social media and new sites.

What heat waves lack in photogenic destruction the sadly more than make up for in deaths. Some of the worst weather disasters in recent history have been heat waves. That's why I liken this to a neutron bomb, those infamous weapons that kill lots and lots of people but generally leave buildings and infrastructure intact. 

A recent Associated Press analysis shows that 2,300 Americans died from hot weather during 2023. This number greatly exceeded the toll in more famous big heat waves in 1980 and 1995

Climate change is making heat waves worse, and spreading them into areas that historically haven't been greatly bothered by such weather. New York saw 18 heat related deaths in 2023. Wisconsin had 14 and Washington State had 11. 

In states where fewer than 10 deaths were reported, data is suppressed for privacy reasons. Vermont is one of those states. Last year, Vermont had somewhere between one and nine heat-related deaths. 

In 2018, just one intense July heat wave killed six people in the Green Mountain State. In the past few decades the only weather event that caused more deaths in Vermont as the flooding from Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, which claimed seven lives. Last summer's catastrophic floods killed two Vermonters. 

Reporting heat deaths is complicated and climate change is certainly not the only reason for the spike in such casualties. 

As the Associated Press reports:  "Deaths are also up because of better reporting and because Americans are getting older and more vulnerable to heat.... The population is also slowly shifting to cities, which are more exposed to heat."

Societal ills are also combining with climate change to kill more people in hot weather. Last year, heat killed 874 people in Arizona, 645 of them in Maricopa County, which is basically metropolitan Phoenix. 

As the AP tells us:

"People were dying in their cars and especially on the streets, where homelessness, drug abuse and mental illness make matters worse. 'In the last five years, we are seeing this consistent and record kid of unprecedented upward trend. And i think it's because the levels of heat that we have seen the last several year have exceeded what we have seen in the last 20 or 30, said (Dr. John) Balbus, the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity at the Department of Human Services."

In other words, the heat is getting worse with climate change in conjunction with a fraying American social net. 

As horrible as the American death toll has been and will be from heat, we have seen some terrible rounds of casualties from hot weather in recent decades.

Analysts tell us some 62,000 Europeans died of heat-related causes in the summer of 2022, which was the continent's hottest on record.  That number was arrived at by comparing how many people died in the summer of 2022 compared to "normal" weather summers. 

An August, 2003  heat wave in France caused another 15,000 deaths.   Another heat wave in Russia back in 2010 caused 55,000 deaths.

Unfortunately, it's inevitable that some people will pass a way in the heat wave beginning engulf the Northeast. We just hope enough people take precautions and find places to stay cool so it won't be that bad.