Federal and local agencies work with citizen scientists to map hotspots around Portland

Portland area counties are joining together to work on a regional heat map. The data will be collected by volunteers, and public health officials hope that the information can help better prepare the region for hotter summers.

In a typical year in Portland, no heat related deaths are reported. In 2021, after the record-breaking heat dome, at least 69 deaths resulted from extreme heat in the last week of June, according to Multnomah County. Summers in Oregon are heating up, and public health officials say that managing heat islands will be an important part of addressing rising temperatures.

Kathleen Johnson is a senior program coordinator at Washington County Public Health. Morgan Zabow is a community heat and health information coordinator for NOAA. And J’reyesha Brannon is a volunteer with Multnomah County who will be collecting data for the heat map research. They join us to share more on the importance of exploring heat in and around Portland and the potential for collaboration among health officials and the general public.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Much of the globe is dealing with scorching and record-breaking heat right now. Scientists say the first two weeks of July were probably the hottest two-week period on record. Often the highest temperatures are found in cities, with their lack of shade and abundance of heat absorbing buildings and asphalt. For a few years now, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has been working with cities around the country to map out their heat islands and to come up with local solutions. Volunteers are getting ready right now to fan out across the Portland metro area as part of this effort. We’re gonna get three perspectives on this right now. J’reyesha Brannon, an artist and civil engineer, is one of the volunteer data collectors for Multnomah County. Kathleen Johnson is a senior program coordinator at Washington County Public Health, and Morgan Zabow is the community heat and health information coordinator for NOAA. Welcome to all three of you.

Morgan Zabow first, I want to start with the big picture. Just how deadly is extreme heat?

Morgan Zabow: Yeah, that’s a great question. Extreme heat kills more Americans each year than any other weather-related event. And that’s something that not a lot of people know. The CDC also estimates there’s an average of 702 people that die each year from heat-related illnesses, and we know that’s also an undercount. So it’s definitely a deadly event. And we also refer to it as a silent killer because we don’t see the impacts as clearly as a hurricane or a tornado, which makes it even more scary why.

Miller: Why? What makes heat so deadly?

Zabow: There’s so many different ways that it impacts our body. We know that when you’re hot, you sweat, and that makes you lose fluids and electrolytes. And in addition, heat makes your blood vessels dilate to increase sweating. So together, all of these things can drop your blood pressure, sometimes enough to make you dizzy and pass out. All of these things together can lead to heat related illnesses like heat cramps, heat exhaustion, and the very serious heat stroke.

Miller: J’reyesha, why did you want to volunteer to take part in this effort?

J’reyesha Brannon: I’ve been volunteering with the county and a couple other community orgs for the last few years. I’m a born and raised Portlander, and I’ve just noticed in the last few years how hot it has been. I never grew up with air conditioning, family still doesn’t have air conditioning, grandma doesn’t have air conditioning. So when it was really hot during our heat dome event, I saw how it affected my family and we had to use some ingenuity to figure out how to be cool, finding air conditioners when there was a shortage of them, piled on top of wildfires and air quality. So if I could help in some way with the city and government and infrastructure in providing resources, which means sometimes just showing the data. Being a part of this mapping project gave me the opportunity to do that. Being part of the mapping campaign where hopefully that data can be used to help provide resources and equip our cities with an idea of where to put resources.

Miller: How did that heat dome in particular affect your family or loved ones?

Brannon: My parents did not have an air conditioning unit, their panel wasn’t really equipped to it. So my dad made a homemade air conditioner with a styrofoam box, some ice, a box fan. And he was really happy with his at home air conditioning system. My grandma still refuses to use some of the air conditioners that we found for her, because there’s a lot of great programs out there for air conditioning units ‒ OfferUp and things like that. But it was like finding that resource quickly when everybody else was doing that in our neighborhood. I now have air conditioning but growing up I didn’t have it. Heat pumps and finding different ways to do that aren’t super cost effective either. So when you live in old houses that Portland has, or if you’re multi-family residents, sometimes air conditioners are not super accessible. So it was something that myself, my friends, and my family were all experiencing.

Miller: Kathleen Johnson, how much public interest have you seen in this mapping project?

Kathleen Johnson: We’ve received so much interest, which has been really great. We had about 20 participants take place in four volunteer trainings. And when we collect data on Saturday, we’ll be working with about 120 of those original volunteers that expressed interest. The public interest has been enormous, and it’s been really exciting to see that.

Miller: What exactly are volunteers going to be doing on Saturday?

Johnson: First, they’re gonna be paired up. We have drivers and navigators, and they’re gonna be paired up. They’re gonna be going out onto about 45 different routes throughout the three counties, Clackamas, Multnomah, and Washington County. They’ll be driving those routes three times during the day, once in the early morning, once in the midafternoon, and then once in the evening. And they’ll have sensors attached to their passenger side window. And with those sensors, air temperature data is gonna be collected, location data will be collected, as well as humidity data.

Miller: And then what will you do when you get all that data together?

Johnson: The collecting part is really exciting, but then I think what we do with the data is also going to be really exciting, and I think hopefully really encouraging. What we’ll do with the data that we get is that we will get a map and a report from the consulting firm that helps to coordinate these events, CAPA Strategies. And with that, we’ll be working with local partners as well as the three county public health departments involved with this project to really adapt and look at policy changes, as well as changes to response plans on how we can better support neighborhoods that we’re seeing as the hottest with that data.

Miller: Morgan Zabow, as you’ve just heard there has been a lot of interest in the tri-county area here, Multnomah, Clackamas, Washington counties, for this effort. As you know, Oregon saw a deadly heat dome just two years ago that killed 69 people just in Multnomah, hundreds in the Pacific Northwest, making this issue painfully real here. Has it been harder to get people in other cities to pay attention to heat islands? And I’m thinking in particular of places maybe where they just feel like they’re used to heat, and a little bit hotter weather seems like less of a big deal.

Zabow: That’s a really great question. I will say, over the past two years, we have seen such an increase in the number of cities that apply for our program. I think like what you said, so many more cities are seeing these increases in heat waves, increases in temperatures over longer periods of times, and especially paired with the increases in emergency department visits related to heat, a lot of people are starting to pay more attention to this issue. And even places that are more typically hot are applying for our program too. One of those places is Sedona, Arizona. They were the first city for the 2023 mapping group that went, and again, a place that faces increasing temperatures over much of the year. So it’s been really great to see more communities taking interest in this program.

But also, this mapping campaign program is such a great educational tool for the cities, and not just for the volunteers, but also for the local decision makers, the local organizations that are involved to really understand how heat is impacting their community by having this data that really outlines the different neighborhoods that are hotter, and also really looking into why the communities are hotter.

Miller: It’s striking that you mentioned Sedona, because folks may have heard just today about Phoenix setting a new record with 19 days in a row of at least 110-degree heat. So you’re saying even in places where very hot summers are the norm, there has been a change in public perception about heat?

Zabow: Absolutely. And it’s also important to know that it’s only gonna be getting hotter in the world that we’re headed in our future. And so making sure that we’re taking these actions now and not waiting until 10, 20 years down the road is so important.

Miller: Kathleen, there are a lot of things that we already know from years of experience, and also the recent work locally of people like Vivek Shandas, who’s been a guest on this show a number of times, a professor at PSU who’s focused on heat islands and shade equity ‒ things like a lack of tree canopy or a lot of dark pavement that just absorbs all that incoming solar radiation. So where do you see gaps in knowledge? What more is there to learn?

Johnson: That’s a great question, Dave. I think we know some gaps, and I think we are still learning about what those gaps are. From a public health perspective, I think one of our current gaps is ‒ I think about my role at Washington County Public Health, and I think about my colleagues in the other public health departments in the region ‒ I think we still have a tremendous information gap. And while Morgan alluded that more people are aware of heat, I think people still need more information on what to do and how we handle extreme heat events. I think even just helping our neighbors, checking in with folks and family members when we’re experiencing extreme heat.

I also think [another knowledge gap is how] effective strategies in the last couple of years that the state has funded portable ac units for low-income households, as well as the heat pump program that’s coming online from the Oregon Department of Energy, how effective those are in providing access to cooling. Is that really helping to prevent those illness and deaths that we’re seeing from the last extreme heat summers that we’ve had?

And I think to the shade equity piece, I think knowledge gaps are how do we really effectively and equitably increase access to green spaces and green infrastructure and cooling pools like tree canopy, but also involve things related to buildings, and those heat absorbing services that you were talking about. I think there’s a lot that we do know now, but definitely more that we could know, and I think that we’re still learning, and that we’ll be continuing to learn over the next couple of years as we really try to implement some of these strategies.

Miller: J’reyesha, what kinds of solutions are you hoping to see?

Brannon: I’m hoping, like what’s been said, that this is a visual representation of where it’s hot. There’s a lot of academia focused on where it’s hot and the studies and the research. But that doesn’t usually reach our frontline communities, folks who are taking the burden and the brunt of most of climate change’s impacts. And so I’m hoping that this visual representation is just another way to make what we’re experiencing more transparent. So I’m hoping that will happen. I’ve seen some of the great things that CAPA Strategies has worked on, and that those maps will be clear and shared with community, and that there’ll be more feedback from community of where they want cooling shelters, where we need more resources for AC, where there needs to be a focus to plant more trees. And I know that the county is working on community-driven climate planning. And so I’m hoping that that data will tie with that project and get more solutions from our local government to help support that work. So, that’s what I’m hoping will happen. And I am an engineer, so I do like maps and data. So I’m excited to see those.

Miller: Morgan Zabow, the mapping is just the first part of this national strategy. And the second part is to help communities come up with equitable cooling solutions. What are examples of solutions that you think have actually been effective in communities around the country?

Zabow: We have been doing this mapping since 2017, working with CAPA Strategies to be able to do this work. And since then, we’ve seen a lot of different strategies, and it’s really important to know that there is not one size fits all solution to urban heat islands. Every community takes a different approach because of so many different aspects and looking at populations that they’re really concerned about.

For example, a great recent example was Las Vegas, Nevada. We mapped them back in 2022, and they saw, by getting their data reports, that a lot of their bus stops were in a lot of the hottest areas of the city. And so they were able to quickly get a federal grant to be able to add shading structures to their bus stops to be able to provide relief to riders who were using the buses.

Additional examples include massive trees planting campaigns like in Cincinnati, Ohio I know is trying to get some tree planting off the ground. Honolulu, Hawaii is trying to plant 10,000 trees. We’ve also seen a lot of the cities being able to add these mapping reports and greater educational campaigns to science museums. With that, we’ve got Richmond, Virginia, I know Boston and Raleigh, North Carolina is also really looking to do that as well. And many cities have been able to use these data reports in their climate action plans or heat made mitigation strategies like in Houston, Texas. And Seattle/King County, which we mapped back in 2020, was able to create their first extreme heat mitigation strategy by using this data too. So there’s a lot of different things that people have been able to do with it.

Miller: Kathleen Johnson just briefly, Multnomah County recently released a new metric called the heat vulnerability index. Is that something you’re considering at Washington County?

Johnson: It is. We have recently hired staff at Washington County Public Health, an emergency preparedness and environmental health epidemiologist, as well as a data analyst. And since their hiring, we’ve really been digging into our county-specific data and hope to be able to share, if not a tool, a similar dataset to really help us inform our Washington County strategies.

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