Seattle Under the Heat Dome

You can learn a lot about thermodynamics while sitting indoors without air-conditioning on a hundred-plus-degree day. Maybe not thermodynamics, exactly; no physicist is going to applaud the lessons here. What I mean is a sort of personal thermodynamics—a study in the varieties of heat conspired against you, and how that heat can be tamed or not (mostly not) with a fan. Here in Seattle, which hit a hundred and eight degrees on Monday night—the highest local temperature on record—and where a majority of residents don’t have air-conditioning, box fans are the only defense that most of us have.

Our homes lack A.C. because, until a few years ago, we rarely needed it. In the verdant, cloud-covered upper-left corner of the U.S., it’s not uncommon for temperatures to stay in the sixties through much of June or even July—or for Seattleites to feel completely robbed of summer altogether, the skies a slate gray seemingly all season long.

A heat wave like the one tormenting the Northwest right now upends all that. Seattle had clocked temperatures above a hundred degrees only three times in the history of recording temperatures here, which began in the late eighteen-hundreds. Then, beginning on Saturday, June 26th, the region surpassed that figure for three straight days, breaking the all-time record on Sunday, June 27th, at a hundred and four degrees, and obliterating that new record a day later, at a hundred and eight.

And so, window blinds down, Seattle residents endured varieties of heat: the still, hot air that sits in the dark bedroom corner like an apparition; the diffuse heat that strikes every part of the body and never lets up; the penetrating heat that holds you by the throat. Or, the only endurable variety, and it’s barely even that: air pushed around by a fan. The placement of fans becomes its own kind of science. Two strategically stationed box fans create a small tempest, swooshing the parched, artificial wind across the skin in multiple directions. The same fans perched on an open windowsill can blow in the cool air after the sun goes down. Except, for three days here, there was no cool air.

Outside, the triple digits raged. The city was stuck beneath a heat dome, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration defines as happening “when strong, high-pressure atmospheric conditions combine with influences from La Niña, creating vast areas of sweltering heat that gets trapped under the high-pressure ‘dome.’ ” The heat dome first blistered the West for almost two weeks—a hundred and twenty-three degrees in Palm Springs, a hundred and fourteen in Las Vegas—and then, in late June, it sat atop the Pacific Northwest. In comparatively well air-conditioned Portland, temperatures hit a hundred and sixteen, an all-time high. Thirty miles outside that city, an Oregon farmworker died, reportedly owing to heat-related conditions. In Seattle, pavement along Interstate 5 cracked and buckled. Dozens of heat-stroke victims entered local emergency rooms. Crews recovered two bodies from lakes and one from a river, presumably taking a swim to escape the heat.

Affordable-housing advocates warned of the threat to some of the city’s most vulnerable residents. Seattle has one of the highest rates of people living with homelessness in the country; many would be left exposed in the deadly, sweltering boil. Senior centers, community centers, and libraries were converted into mass public cooling stations. Fire crews distributed bottled water and ice.

If you’re sitting in New York or Atlanta or Phoenix or Las Vegas right now, with an unseen vent lashing you with a cool breeze, you may read about these temperatures—and about how the Pacific Northwest is in a collective freakout over them—and respond with a shrug. You may not have known that Seattle is the least air-conditioned major city in the U.S. Only forty-four per cent of Seattleites have air-conditioning, either central air or window units, the Seattle Times has reported, based on 2019 U.S. Census Bureau data. Income only partially accounts for this number. “Renters with a household income of $80,000 or higher . . . are more likely to have air conditioning than those with lower incomes,” the article observed. But for homeowners, “income bracket isn’t a significant factor.”

Things are changing. The number of local homes with A.C. has increased by thirteen per cent since 2013, according to the Seattle Times, which speculated that this might be attributable to the higher temperatures. The region is expected to warm by some 5.8 degrees Fahrenheit within the next three decades, the Climate Impacts Group, at the University of Washington, has observed. And increased temperatures mean an increased number of extreme-weather events.

Until recently, Seattle seemed less influenced by climate change than, say, the Gulf States or the Southwest; before this past weekend, the city hadn’t experienced a hundred-plus-degree day in more than a decade. In 2014, asked where people might consider moving as global temperatures rise, a climate researcher told the Times, “The answer is the Pacific Northwest, and probably especially west of the Cascades.” That no longer seems like a sure bet.

After spiking at a hundred and eight degrees just before 6 P.M. on Monday, the temperature remained in the triple digits until about 8 P.M. Power went out in pockets around the city, leaving even those with A.C. no respite. And then, just when you’d have sworn that this inferno had become our only way of being, the fever broke. On Tuesday morning, Seattleites woke to a breezy sixty-four degrees. Marine clouds had wisped in overnight, cooling the air and blocking temperatures from climbing beyond the upper eighties.

But even as we exhale with relief, we know that worse is still likely coming. Fire season has begun, and it’s just a matter of weeks, perhaps days, before, like last year, smoke from burning forests choke our skies, making breathing difficult and opening windows for a blast of cool evening air a nonstarter.

For years, Seattleites have talked about the dangers of climate change. But, with events like the heat dome, many are waking up to the firsthand realities of a heating planet. Maybe the rest of the country is, too. After hearing about the scorching weather here, a friend who lives in a hot desert state texted me, “I always thought the northwest would be my climate refuge.”