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Hear the Heat: Our Song Demonstrates What it Felt Like Inside Harlem Homes This Summer
Every 15 minutes, temperature sensors built by WNYC and its partners in the Harlem Heat Project have been recording temperatures inside 30 Harlem apartments. All day. All night.
We wanted you to hear what the heat in Harlem sounds like on an average summer day. So the WNYC Data News team looked at the average heat index throughout the day and turned each feels-like temperature into a musical note. We then condensed a full 24 hours of readings into 20-second songs: one for the outdoor temperature, and one for the indoor temperature. Continue reading
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VIDEO: Huff Post Covers Harlem Heat Project
The web news video show Huffington Post Rise recently profiled AdaptNY’s Harlem Heat Project in a two-and-a-half-minute video that features an interviews with participants from our community-based partner in the project.
In the clip, West Harlem resident Shaun Williams, who hosts one of our heat index sensors in his home, shares his experience of high heat. Also, Huffington Post spoke with policy expert Aurash Kharwarzad of our partner WE ACT for Environmental Justice. Kharwarzad explains the urban heat island effect and its health impacts on city residents, as well as the workings of the sensor and our participatory research project, and possible solutions to the heat challenge.
View the video here:
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Neither Ice Blocks Nor Cooling Centers Protect New Yorkers Entirely from Heat Risks
Children lick a block of ice on a hot summer day (Photo Bain News Service, 1912)
In 1896, when a massive heat wave hit New York, it was not city government’s problem.
For 10 days that summer, outdoor temperatures rocketed above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, reaching up to 120 degrees inside old brick tenement buildings. Ice companies jacked up the price of ice, horses fainted by the hundreds, and by the end of the heat wave, nearly 1,500 New Yorkers had died.
The mayor didn’t call an emergency meeting with his department heads until the emergency was almost over. But it was that summer, according to historian Edward Kohn, that a giant shift in government’s role took place.
A young Theodore Roosevelt was the city’s police commissioner at the time, and seeing that the mayor wasn’t acting, he took matters into his own hands. He opened up the police precinct on the Lower East Side and handed out ice to the poor immigrants living in tenements there.
“For Theodore Roosevelt to say, ‘Well, no, the government should be responsible — should purchase this ice and hand it out for free’ — that was a pretty radical notion,” said Kohn, the author of Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt.
The notion is no longer radical. The city tackles extreme heat today through long- and short-term strategies. But some of its initiatives are poorly executed or stuck in the planning stages. An estimated 140 people still die every year due to heat. Continue reading
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UPDATED: Voices of Harlem Heat Project
(UPDATED SEPT. 12) As AdaptNY’s Harlem Heat Project evolves, we’re not just gathering indoor heat data from residents there. We’re also inviting our community collaborators to share their heat-related stories. With the help of our project partner ISeeChange, the citizens of Harlem can offer their insights and observations as the summer season brings heat, and occasional relief. See a few selections below. And tell us your own Harlem Heat story here, or for mobile users, via the Apple app here.
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As Temperatures Climb, the Elderly, Frail and Poor Are Put at Risk
Dr. Anar Shah works in the ER at Mount Sinai Hospital in Harlem (Sarah Gonzalez / WNYC)
After sitting in her un-airconditioned fifth-floor apartment as the temperature surpassed 90 degrees Fahrenheit for several days in a row, 69-year-old Helen called 911.
“I couldn’t deal the heat,” she says with some difficulty. “It was too hot for me, and then I had feel weak.”
An ambulance brought her from her building in East Harlem to Mount Sinai Hospital, where she was admitted for heat exhaustion. She has a few medical issues, including a stomach problem. And her daughter says she’s stubborn: She doesn’t drink water when she knows she’s supposed to.
“My head start to hurt, and then I start to throw up and I had feel a little dizzy a little,” says Helen, a fictitious name made up to protect her privacy.
She talks from the hospital bed with her eyes closed. She doesn’t want to leave the hospital and go back to her hot apartment.
“Oh, God. The fan ain’t doing no good, at all,” Helen says. “With this heat? No, I can’t do that.”
Elderly people like Helen, young children and others with pre-existing medical conditions are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat. Public health professionals say air conditioning — even just a couple minutes of it — is the best way to lessen the effects of extreme heat. Continue reading
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Meet the Heat: How Hot Weather Harms Health for NYC Residents
Courtesy Rawle C. Jackman, Flickr Creative Commons
Fact: Heat can kill. Some people may just feel uncomfortable when it’s hot, but for others the high temperatures and humid air can cause real harm and lead to untimely death.
Fact: Sick people are more likely to be affected by the heat. When someone suffers from chronic conditions like heart disease or even alcohol addiction, it can worsen the body’s ability to cope with sweltering summers.
Fact: The heat is very much intertwined with economics and social structures. Many heat sufferers are affected much more than others simply because of where they live, their financial situations, or even their ethnicities.
Here are 14 facts about how New Yorkers experience the heat and its effects. Continue reading
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Heat Waves by the Dozen
Call it the Blazing 2000s.
While New York’s temperate climate may not conjure up the image of a sweltering desert, the city has seen numerous stretches of scorching temperatures almost every year since 2001 – often three or four heat waves annually and sometimes as many as half a dozen.
In the past month alone, New York has been hit with a pair of five-day heat waves, the first July 21-25 and the latest Aug. 11-15, per data from the National Weather Service.
We’ve put together the infographic below for a quick look at New York’s recent heat wave history. Continue reading
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Extreme Heat Threatens Electrical Infrastructure in Upper Manhattan
The 2003 blackout in New York City. (Photo courtesy of Dan Nguyen/Flickr)
New York’s July 21-25 heatwave hit all of city, but only in Upper Manhattan did hundreds of residents lose power for an entire day. As temperatures spiked to 95 degrees on July 24, more than 1,000 East Harlem residents were unable to turn on their air conditioners or fans.
The outage may not have been a passing inconvenience, but rather a harbinger of a much worse failure to come.
“The problem is the electricity distribution system is on the verge of collapse,” said Isaiah “Obie” Bing, a member of Conservancy North and a retired Con Edison engineer who spent his career working on the Upper Manhattan networks.
“I could paint you a lot of worst case scenarios,” said Bing. “They happen all the time.” Continue reading
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CURATION: NYC Heat Wave Recap
New York’s July heat wave may not have made the record books — it only hit five consecutive days of 90-plus degree weather, according to the National Weather Service — but ask New Yorkers and we all can agree that the humidity and trapped heat in and around our homes were nothing to write off. We put together this recap: Continue reading