Surviving the 2021 Pacific Northwest Heat Dome

(NOTE: This is non-fiction, it is an account of the Seattle heat dome event in June 2021.)

Taking a sip of my mojito, my wife and I stared out over the crashing waves of the pacific. Our resort in Puerto Vallarta had an open-air steakhouse, which despite the humidity was calm and relaxing. The lighting was dim, the mood was intimate. Yet we were focused on practical matters.

“Are we all checked in for our flight? What’s the weather like back in Seattle?” My wife asked.

Pulling out my phone I answered that our flight was ready. Then I looked at the forecast. It didn’t seem right, was I really looking at Seattle rather than Puerto Vallarta?

“Whoa, love, look at this. It says one-hundred-five tomorrow. Then it climbs even higher into the week.”

Second guessing, she asked, “wait, that’s Seattle, not here?”

I nodded. Then I took a big swig of my drink. “I guess we better appreciate this balmy eighty-five while we have it then, right?”

Twenty hours later, we stepped out of the air-conditioned airport terminal and into the scorching heat of our home city. It was just past five in the evening and with a glim haze of forest fire smoke, the entire urban sprawl seemed painted an acrid yellow.

Wheeling our luggage to our car, we got in and checked the dashboard. One-hundred-seven. We couldn’t even remember the last time it had felt this hot. Strangely, despite the scorching heat, the humidity was very low compared to Puerto Vallarta, which was oddly relieving.

The drive home was tough on our little car, the air conditioner cranked up to maximum. After fighting traffic, we made it back to our house. Unpacking the trunk, my wife raced inside to check on our two cats.

The inside of our tiny trailer home was baking hot. Fortunately, our pets were alright. They were what we affectionately refer to as “flat cats,” as in they lay flat on the ground unmoving, trying not to cause any body heat. They seemed miserable.

My first order of business was to grab the several window AC units I could and get them hooked up. One floor unit has a hose that vents outside, and could blow twenty degrees cooler than ambient. This was front and center in our living room.

Normally in the summer, we just open the windows at night and cool down during the night. This time was different, it was staying over a hundred degrees at night. Taking a cool shower, we placed the fan directly at our bed, and slept without even the sheets. I missed the air-conditioned hotel room we had just been staying in. We barely slept; it was just too dang hot.

The next day my wife drove to work while I had to get setup in the home office. Looking at the forecast for the day, it was showing a high of one-hundred-twelve. Pulling an audible, I moved the big AC unit into the office with me. I figured a smaller space would be easier to keep cool. Taking my cats into the office room with me, I prepared for my usual workday.

In the morning things were okay, then the temperature started to climb. In the late morning, the sun was pounding on the window, aimed directly inside. Then I remembered something.

Earlier that year I had bought a bunch of mylar film to make an enclosed seed-starting shelf. I’d wanted to do garden starts early and take a shot at growing microgreens. Sorting through our garden shed I found it! With some duct tape, I put the brightly reflective film over all our windows. Our little metal trailer couldn’t bake if it was too shiny to absorb heat.

Settling back down to my computer, I continued working, but something felt off. My stomach did not agree with me. They say not to drink the water in Mexico, which I did not do directly from the tap, but I did drink water from the restaurant. Also, there were still some waves of COVID circulating, and despite getting the booster, maybe we’d picked something up.

I began feeling nauseous, dizzy. I kept well hydrated, but between my sudden illness and the climbing temperature, I could barely focus. With a cool wet cloth over my face, I laid down on the floor with my cats. My head was literally spinning. This heat was otherworldly.

That’s when my neighbor with a weather station shot me a few texts. Every twenty minutes, he’d send another one with a higher temperature. One-o-eight, one-hundred-ten, one-hundred-twelve, and it wasn’t even noon yet. Unsure of my condition, I called my wife.

“Sorry honey, I’m just feeling a bit delirious, how are things with you?”

She worked in a manufacturing center in a farming town at the foot of Mount Rainier. Her office, and the entire shop floor, had zero air-conditioning. Three months ago, their office had lost their environmental health and safety, or EHS lead, to another company. They had not yet backfilled the role. My wife, in human resources, was the closest thing they had.

“It’s crazy here, the management is calling everyone wusses, that its like this every day in Phoenix, but the floor lead from there says that they have air-conditioning down there. I don’t know what to do, there are people here with medical conditions. They aren’t even sending the welders home.”

Talking about my health circumstances, my wife made a suggestion. “Go fill up the stock tank or the bath-tub with cold water and get in.”

We’d bought an aluminum stock tank intending to use it as a planter, but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. After a few heavy rainfalls, we’d noticed water filling up inside, and that we could water the garden with it. Now it was a lifeline. Preparing to step outside, I received another text from my neighbor. One-hundred-fifteen.

Signing into work, I messaged my boss, “I think I have heat stroke or something, I’ll be offline for a few hours.”

Finding a spot of shade, spinning in circles from my delirium, I turned on the hose and filled the tank. Stripping down to my boxer-briefs, I got in and let the cool water fill in around me. Dipping my head in, I let the water soak my hair, it was as refreshing as anything I could remember. Mentally I was back in the pool at the resort in Puerto Vallarta.

Then I turned off the hose and just relaxed. It was in this state of cooling that I noticed something profoundly “off” about the world around me. Silence. Normally there is road noise, people walking, birds chirping, dogs barking, neighbors mowing the lawn or using some powered equipment. Today there was literally nothing. It was as if God had “pressed the mute button.”

It was dead quiet. The only noise was an occasional car driving by, but even the flow of traffic seemed lessened. To say it was eerie would be an understatement.

My neighbor texted again. One-hundred-seventeen. No, one-hundred-eighteen. Never in my entire life growing up in the pacific northwest, had I ever experienced something like this. It simply didn’t seem possible. It was mind-boggling, unimaginable.

Later, as evening fell, my wife made it home. After texting with some friends, that evening we drove over to their house to take advantage of their cooling setup. We did leave our AC running for the cats. I can only imagine the strain on the electrical grid that day, but it did hold. Having ice water, we each talked about our day.

I had fought against heat stroke, my wife had rallied against ignorant factory management, and our friend had a story of his own. Working on a construction project, their building was nearly finished. Intended as senior living, they were in the final stages of carpentry and appliances.

To keep the building cool, they had been running the HVAC system. This was beyond the capabilities of the system. The condenser had reached a critical limit, and a flood of water had burst out of the equipment. This unit was room-sized and on the top-story. The ensuing flood had trickled down through at least three levels. Maintenance technicians had needed to wade through six inches of water to shut it off.

“Thank God there wasn’t anybody living there yet. Can you imagine if a bunch of seniors suddenly lost the cooling system? People would die.”

People had died. As the details came out in the months to come, one-hundred-twenty-six deaths happened because of the heat wave. There was also a massively visible change to Mount Rainier, which looms above the cities south of Seattle. Record spring snowfalls were erased in a week. In no uncertain terms, the mountain looked “naked.”

Known as a “heat dome,” a stagnant point of high-pressure air sits and traps the warmth. If the humidity had been higher, it would have been a “wet bulb” event, where people can literally boil alive inside their own skin simply from breathing the air. We saw several dead animals on the roads that week, although a family of deer did take refuge in the shaded woods in the rear of our property.

Months later, we noticed that several of our Douglas fir trees had succumbed to the stress. All the needles turned red and fell off. These trees had to be removed as they were now a falling hazard. Summer smoke in late summer was also particularly bad that year, the heat and smoke in August was like an aftershock of the heat dome in June.

The one positive that came out of the event was a series of heat-related labor laws. Under extreme conditions, employers need to be able to provide shade, water and rest where appropriate. It only took two weeks for the emergency rules to be released, and most of these were later signed into law. Then the University of Washington pulled together an initiative to study and find mitigations for extreme heat events.

A year later, several of our neighbors went on a tree-cutting spree, and a developer took out an entire stretch of forest to put in a series of compact homes. When voicing concerns that they were creating a “heat island,” I was called a number of extremely negative names and slurs. Everyone with heat pumps and efficient air-conditioning simply wrote off the entire event, forgot about it.

My wife and I didn’t, we moved. Finding a home nearer to the ‘Puget Sound’ in the northern part of the state, the temperature stays a consistent twenty degrees cooler than the urban areas around Seattle. These events will happen again, but next time, we will be ready. When our friends and family need somewhere to escape the agony, our doors will be open for them.

For now, however, I think it’s time for me to go make my wife a mojito and hang out on the beach. It’s not Mexico but sometimes it feels like it.

PSA: be sure to come up with a ‘heat plan’ – find out more about what services are offered by your city, county or state. Remember, if the heat is too extreme, a cold bath can be a lifeline. Check up on any older relatives if you are able to. Stay cool!