More green space, fewer silos: King County reveals new extreme heat plan

King County officials on Thursday presented a new plan for keeping residents safe during the hotter summers ahead. They say the plan will help local jurisdictions respond to extreme heat with a more unified approach.

The county's extreme heat mitigation strategy report, which outlines priorities for saving lives during heat waves, cites the Pacific Northwest Heat Dome in June 2021 as being “the single most deadly climate disaster event in Washington State." More than 125 heat-related deaths were reported statewide, 34 of those deaths being in King County.

County officials say they’ll employ emergency measures like cooling centers, but also seek to expand green spaces to save lives during heat waves fueled by climate change. King County has commissioned maps of its heat islands, where temperatures can be 20 degrees higher than areas with more trees and green space.

Tom McLeod is mayor of the city of Tukwila, where heat islands were documented. He said his city is working to address the higher temperatures created by all its paved infrastructure.

“Tukwila’s equity policy includes equitable physical development of the city, including urban forestry and extreme heat prevention. The city’s tree regulations support these goals by both retaining valuable existing trees, and the planting of new trees.”

Heidi Watters, Tukwila’s urban environmentalist, said there's an argument that trees provide benefits and should be viewed like other city assets or utilities.

“They are infrastructure, and they take up space and they take up money," she said.

Meanwhile, the group Tree Action Seattle is protesting the possible removal of an 80-foot Douglas Fir nearby in Seattle's South Park neighborhood. They say it’s the last tree on the block, in a neighborhood that already disproportionately lacks tree canopy.

Beck Lin is a manager at the development firm seeking to build townhomes on the lot including the tree at 1033 South Cloverdale Street in South Park. Lin said in an email, "We are working closely with the architect to examine all possible alternatives. We hope to find the best solution that will work for everyone in the community."

King County officials said planning for future heat waves will also include more multi-lingual communications about the risks of heat waves, and providing more portable air conditioning for people most vulnerable to heat injury. Officials said they'd partner with existing organizations like Meals on Wheels to help those residents.

Tony Machacha, the community capacity manager with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, said it’s helpful that the strategy incorporates the needs of people his agency serves alongside everyone else.

“It’s good to be able to think about everybody as residents and not keep on bifurcating between the homeless and those with homes,” he said. “When it comes to emergencies like heat, we’re all under the same heat dome, so it’s good we’re thinking together like that.”

Machacha said the authority helped provide outdoor shelters and services during the heat dome in 2021, and has since worked with the National Weather Service’s heat risk index to prioritize the places and people facing the greatest danger from high temperatures.

King County's new strategy calls for providing unsheltered people with cooling kits that contain things like water and wet towels, but those kits don’t yet have a funding source.

Lara Whitely Binder, the climate preparedness program manager for King County, said the strategy creates a lens to prioritize heat islands, and it will require various funding sources to address them.

“The advantage of the strategy is we can now look at this collectively as a set of activities," she said. "And instead of one jurisdiction working over here in a silo on one particular activity, we can look across jurisdictional boundaries, and really maximize those investments to get the work done.”