Hospitals brace for surge as Seattle area feels the heat

Hospitals in Washington state are bracing for a surge in heat victims at their emergency rooms. They hope to avoid a repeat of the 2021 heat wave, which killed an estimated 400 people in the state.

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he scorching temperatures of the Pacific Northwest’s ongoing heat wave come about 13 months after the region endured its most extreme heat ever.

Hundreds of people died in those record-shattering temperatures.

Since that wake-up call, many in the region have been trying to prepare for a hotter future, from installing air conditioning to strengthening the health-care system.

Seattleites are hoping this time around isn’t as bad as the last time, when the 911 calls poured in.

“We’ve been extremely busy everywhere today because of the weather, so it could be quite a while before we get out there,” one King County 911 operator had to tell a man in Kenmore on June 28, 2021.

He was calling in about another man collapsed on the sidewalk in triple-digit heat.

“We’ve been slammed the whole weekend,” the operator explained.

On that day, more people in King County made medical calls to 911 than ever before. That week, heat-related visits to emergency rooms shot up 70-fold in the Northwest.

“Pretty much every hospital in our region had a record number of heat emergencies,” said emergency physician Steve Mitchell, who runs the emergency department at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center.

Some hospitals, including Valley Medical Center in Renton, were especially hard hit.

“They saw a career’s worth of heat-related, severe illness, and, sadly, people dying from these heat-related illnesses in a very brief period of time, like within eight hours,” Mitchell said.

He said last summer’s extreme heat pushed hospitals to their limits.

Valley nearly ran out of ventilators. Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett nearly ran out of ice, a key part of its heat response. Medical teams placed heat-stroke patients in body bags filled with ice to lower their core body temperatures.

Since then, health-care officials have been aiming to avoid a repeat.

This week’s temperatures aren’t expected to match last year’s heat dome.

“But we're not taking any chances,” Mitchell said.

The state’s hospitals have ramped up their system for redirecting ambulances toward less-crowded emergency rooms and made other preparations.

Last year, Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia, Washington, had to send more than 100 staff home to reduce the load on its 50-year-old air conditioning system.

CEO Darin Goss said that’s what it took to keep patients’ rooms cool.

“It was a wake-up call for the impacts of climate change for us,” Goss said. “Having several days over 100 degrees, that was tough for us.”

Goss said last year’s difficulties led the hospital to make some changes.

“It really led to us this year making a difficult decision to rent portable chillers to be ready,” he said.

The chillers are big diesel-powered units sitting on trailers outside the main hospital building.

Goss said it was a difficult decision because of the cost. Adding diesel cooling is also a setback for the hospital’s efforts to save energy and be carbon-neutral by the end of the decade. The hospital has plans for a climate-proof and climate-friendly upgrade to its buildings’ heating and cooling systems, but that project is a year from completion.

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ot that there’s ever a good time for extreme heat, but health-care officials say it’s really not a good time now.

“The hospitals are full,” Onora Lien with the Northwest Healthcare Response Network said on the Friday before the current heat wave began. The coalition helps hospitals prepare for disasters like heat waves and pandemics.

“I definitely have some nervousness around how busy the hospitals are already,” she said.

An ongoing pandemic, staff shortages, and difficulty finding long-term care beds for recovering patients have hospitals full to the gills.

The situation contrasts with the heat wave in June 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic was in a lull.

Lien said the public needs to do its part to avoid straining hospitals any further.

“We want to avoid people needing to go to hospitals or to get emergency care unnecessarily,” she said. “So everything the public can do right now to keep people from getting sick is important.”

As of Wednesday morning, University of Washington Medicine officials said they had not seen a surge in overheated patients.

University of Washington climate and health researcher Kristie Ebi said that’s not surprising.

“It takes a while for our core body temperature to rise,” she said. “Typically, you don't see much impacts in the first 24 hours of a heat wave. It's the second 24 hours where you start seeing impacts.”

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emperatures in the 90s or even triple digits might not be a big deal in some parts of the country. But the Seattle area has long had a climate so mild that most homes don’t have air conditioning.

“Washington state isn’t really designed to take on this kind of heat,” said Julia Kitch of Bothell.

Kitch works for a heating and cooling contractor.

“I work in the service department, so I get all the phone calls for all of the overheating equipment,” she laughed.

With heat waves and ever-warmer temperatures, air-conditioning is in high demand. But supply-chain chaos has limited available inventories.

Even someone like Kitch, who works in the industry, has been unable to get air-conditioning for her home recently.

“I'm thankful to have A/C,” said Kitch’s friend, Sara Gantner of Everett, who was with her at Seattle’s Northgate light rail station. “I hope everybody else can get it, too.”

Gantner said her furnace broke down during the pandemic, so she saved up and replaced it with a heat pump – an energy-saving device that can both heat and cool a home.

“It's more efficient, better for the environment. You don't have to pay for natural gas, which they're phasing out, I've heard,” Gantner said.

She got her heat pump a few months before the 2021 heat wave.

“Thank God my house was only 85 and not 105,” she said.

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or those who have no place to cool off, local officials have been putting out heat warnings and cooling advice in multiple languages and opening up cooling centers.

But climate often moves faster than government.

The city of Seattle has come up with a heat action plan, but it’s still a draft, under wraps.

King County officials say it took a year to get federal funding to put together an extreme-heat strategy. They aim to finish it a year from now.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said the state is doing what it can to keep heat waves from killing people, including new rules to protect outdoor workers and subsidized air conditioners and energy-saving heat pumps for low-income households.

“We're doing 100 things to respond in the short term, but unless we attack climate change at its source, there are not enough ice cubes or air conditioners on the planet to protect us,” Inslee said.

As long as humanity keeps adding heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, we should expect heat waves to get worse.

Back at the light rail station, Julia Kitch said her number-one worry without air conditioning has been her golden retriever, Arlo. Fortunately she works in an air-conditioned office.

“I'll just take my dog to work with me,” Kitch said.

It may seem a small thing on a planet starting to heat out of control, but Kitch did something else for Arlo.

She bought him booties so he won’t burn his paws on the pavement.