The Daily - The Man Trying to Save Phoenix From Historic Heat

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

As a historic heat wave grips much of the world and the United States, no city has become more emblematic of the crisis than Phoenix, where temperatures have exceeded 110 degrees for the past three weeks.Today, the city’s chief heat officer, David Hondula, discusses how the city is adjusting to the new reality of chronic extreme heat — and whether we are adapting to it fast enough.Guest: David Hondula, the director of heat response and mitigation for the city of Phoenix.Background reading: Arizona is used to scorching summers, but a long stretch of days with 110-degree temperatures is straining patience and resources.Weeks of 110-degree days have left the Phoenix fire department scrambling to rescue people overcome by heat — a test for a force already accustomed to tough summers.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily Watch. As a historic heat wave grips much of the world and the United States, no city has become more emblematic of the crisis than Phoenix, Arizona. Never in the city's history has it been this hot for this long. Where temperatures have exceeded 110 degrees Fahrenheit for the past three weeks. It's like you open an oven door and it's what it feels like. As long as I stay under this tree, I'm okay. When the sun goes down, we're out walking and going to the park, so I guess we have to be vampires in this kind of weather.

going to the park, so I guess we have to be vampires in this kind of weather. Today, a conversation with Phoenix's chief heat officer about how the city is adjusting to the new reality of chronic extreme heat and whether we're adapting to it fast enough. It's Thursday, July 20th. Hey, Dave. How are you doing? Good, good, good, good. Thank you for making time for us. We really appreciate it. Absolutely.

And I know we've got a coordination meeting here at 2 our time, so we'll get as far as we can for as much of that time as possible. Gorgeous. Okay, so Dave, can you just introduce yourself for our listeners? Absolutely. My name is Dave Hondula. I'm the Director of Heat Response and Mitigation for the City of Phoenix. We're so proud in Phoenix to have the country's first publicly funded office in the government working on heat and every day learning how we can do that work better. The first in the nation. Wow. It has been a good learning experience for us. We're almost

two years into the job here in Phoenix. There was certainly a sense that more work needed to be done on heat. Things are getting warmer. Heat is a significant public health hazard. Right. And heat is a hazard that has fallen into a governance gap historically. Okay, well, we'll turn to that governance gap in just a few moments. But basically, you're the official heat authority in Phoenix. And as it happens, we're talking to you after your city made history, 19 consecutive days of temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. At this very moment, I just checked, it's 112 degrees Fahrenheit there.

I mean, Phoenix has always been hot in the summer, but this is a new kind of intensity. So can you describe for us what this kind of heat feels like over especially this many consecutive days? Because from a distance, especially from the Northeast, it's a little bit alien to a lot of us. Yeah, I think our experience right now is actually not so dissimilar from what many of the cold weather states experience in the winter, when the long cold spells, in some case with snowing around, very much changes the cadence of daily life. If it's snowy or icy, there's just a little bit of a careful way we have to move about the city, not to slip, not to touch something that's too cold.

And I see the same thing in the heat world as well, being careful touching the steering wheel, seatbelt buckle. As a new parent, we have a year and a half year old, even something simple like when we can go for a walk with the stroller is really quite limited now to early morning hours or late evening hours. I think one would be very hard pressed to find anyone at a public playground during times of high sun angle. There are certainly plenty of public spaces that are a little quieter in the summer, the playground, the sports field. It feels like it's a little harder to see people moving about the city at this time of the year. So how is it affecting your work and what it means to be the chief heat officer in this moment of history-making heat in Phoenix? Walk us through that. interesting time to have this job in this place of the United States right now. In general,

our office really has two related missions. One is what we call heat response. And I've probably made more phone calls and sent more text messages over the past two weeks than I have in any other two-week period of my life, trying to help coordinate our regional response with many partners over the past weekend. For example, we anticipated a surge of people needing relief from the heat at some of our downtown cooling centers and respite centers. And we were able to get some volunteers and other supplies deployed to those locations. But we also focus on what we call heat mitigation, long-term strategies for cooling the city and making it more comfortable. And it is important for that work to continue as well, even as we have these emergency heat conditions manifesting,

getting ready for tree planting initiatives in the fall. All of that needs to continue as well as responding to this heat event. Did you ever think, Dave, that you would be doing this job under these conditions? That you would be contending with heat this intense? I would say yes. Now, three

years ago, I never envisioned, nobody envisioned that anybody would be doing this job. We should say that first and foremost. The idea of a heat role in local government didn't even exist. But I think as somebody who has studied climate data quite intimately in the past, I think the general idea that here in Phoenix, indeed hot cities all across the Sunbelt, that it can be very hot for a long period of time. It's certainly why we've planned for heat as a chronic hazard, not an episodic one. Well, tell me, Dave, how you got here, to this position,

how you became this person in this moment, the heat guy in the hottest city. Were you always drawn to heat? I wouldn't say I was always drawn to heat, but certainly always drawn to the weather. Growing up in New Jersey, I experienced all four seasons, and I have vivid memories of taking my parents' VHS

camcorder out on the streets when we'd have snow or flooding and try to document it and tell the story to no audience at the time what was happening with the weather. Remained interested in weather going into high school. Actually had the dubious or distinguished role of being the weather reporter on our homeroom TV channels, again, telling the story to the public what's happening with the weather. Now,

a little bit of a larger audience. But never really understood that heat was a topic of interest until I got connected with my advisor in grad school who was in this discipline called biometeorology and somehow or another was relating temperature and health outcomes. And it didn't take very long to become heat, arguably the leading weather-related killer in the United States, certainly responsible for more health impacts than most other hazards combined. And I think the lack of attention to heat compared to some of the other hazards was also a little bit of a draw. Well, explain that. What do you mean the lack of attention? Yeah, well, I think if we were to take a random sample of media coverage of weather hazards in the United States over the past 10 years,

I suspect the big headlines, the big stories would largely be dominated by hazards that break stuff. Right. Hurricanes, tornadoes. Winter storms, tornadoes, which have very real societal costs. I don't mean to downplay the importance of those hazards. They produce real tangible infrastructure costs as well. We can see the building being ripped off of its foundation. We can see the community that's been devastated by the tornado. Phoenix is going to look about the same after this heat event as it did beforehand.

Hmm. So the lack of attention to this intrigues you, gets you motivated to study heat. Obviously, you follow that passion into this role, the first in the city's history. I'm curious, when you stepped into that just a couple of years ago, Curious, when you stepped into that just a couple of years ago, what your vision was for helping Phoenix deal with and adapt to heat? What specific objectives you were trying to achieve, knowing that it was always going to be hot there? Absolutely. I think my personal motivation to even consider applying for the job in the first place came from my own experience. And I think what many of my colleagues were feeling as well, were really studying a lot

about this heat challenge. And we're not sure that all of that interesting, maybe useful information is going anywhere. And at some point, I guess we can write an infinite number of papers, but if they're not actually serving some type of societal benefit, that could feel a little bit of an empty exercise over time. And so I envisioned that part of my role and stepping into this role, can we take the incredible body of research that's been generated and help local government make better decisions to serve the public and address the many, many different challenges that he brings to cities all across the country. How do we protect people on the top? And over the long term,

can we realize the vision of a more comfortable city for everyone in the future? future. We'll be right back. I just wanted to note the time, but I think we probably just need like 10 more minutes, if that's okay. Okay, let me, I'm just going to open up this other call and mute them, but just let them know I am here. This is our regional cooling center work group, and of course, a big day for that group today. I imagine. What specifically would a more comfortable city in this heat look like, and how did you start to envision what that would be,

how it would manifest itself, what the particulars of it would become? If we were to go to a community meeting and talk about heat right now and what neighborhoods are looking for, we'd probably hear some concerns about high electricity bills first, but quickly thereafter

would be the need for more shade. A more comfortable Phoenix of the future is one that has more shade. And there's a big ask of our office and request from the community to really accelerate tree planting here in the city. When we think about climate change and how hot places are, we're often talking about, even just when we started our conversation today, we're talking about the air temperature that's measured at Sky Harbor Airport. But I think what we're really trying to shift our thinking to is what is the actual radiant environment? What is the thermal comfort

of the spaces that people are moving through throughout the city? It could be 120 degrees at Sky Harbor Airport, but the experience of a person in the shade moving throughout the city can be much more comfortable than 120 degrees in the sun. And when you first stepped into this role to present day, what challenges have you encountered in trying to create, for example, more shade? It probably means more trees, right? More gardens, more structures that create shade. But that's not something, from my experience in covering government, that any one official can do. So I'm curious what kind of obstacles you bump into. So we know that the city historically, at least over the past decade, has struggled to make progress, arguably in part because there hasn't been a team that has been responsible for coordination across all city departments and community efforts.

But it's really been in the site identification that we spent a lot of time and had a lot of learning. There might be a thousand people across the country, maybe 10,000, who have generated some type of map in their academic journey to inform cities where to plant trees. Right. And for coming to city government, I thought we were doing a good job working with the city to understand how to make those tools useful. But we partnered with the street transportation department on one of their tree planting programs.

And the street transportation department here maintains certain areas along the streets in the city. Right. Listeners can imagine a map of 10,000 little irregularly shaped polygons scattered throughout the city where the city can plant trees. So in this particular case, those are the spaces, the only places where the street transportation department can plant trees. We've been prioritizing the wrong types of areas. So a little bit of back to the drawing board. If the question is, what are the most important landscape maintenance areas to plant in now? Right. So you come at it from the perspective of, we should put this huge number of trees in this place and create shade.

Meanwhile, you've got a city workforce that has rules that say they can only plant trees in these small little parcels of land, maybe near roads. So your goals aren't necessarily aligned, which means you have to go back and figure out how to get the thing you want. All of which is to say that being the chief heat officer at a place like Phoenix means coming up with great ideas and realizing that they're very hard to pull off within the bureaucracy and rules and realities of a city government. And I would argue it means being a little persistent and being willing to try to ruffle some feathers a little bit. But through those experiences, we generated a little saying among our team, the heat office wasn't created to maintain the status quo. So all those rules, processes, institutional memories that you referenced. In some cases, I see it as our job to try to shake those up a little bit

because clearly there's an ask from our elected leadership here, an ask in the community to do something different than we have past to present. I'm really curious what a truly successful program is going to look like because in a lot of people's estimation, a place like Phoenix was never really meant to be lived in at heat levels like this. I'm sure you've heard this argument. Maybe you reject it. I mean, you've become the heat authority in a place. So obviously you are invested in it being livable. But there's an argument to be made that a place like Phoenix isn't really supposed to be where huge housing sub-developments are created and where people try to ride out 112 degree days

day after day after day after day and i wonder how you think about being the person who's trying to help people adapt to that some people might view that as you asking them to get used to it and kind of think of it as normal, when it's in some ways not a normal thing to try to live in an environment like that. Well, if we were to go back millions of years, it would have seemed absurd to have people live anywhere on the planet right now. Hostile conditions with large predators roaming around that would eat us and so on. So I think it's just a question of a sort of timeframe and a starting point for this conversation. Of course, some of the earliest societies really developed and boomed in some of the

hottest places on the planet. Now, were they exactly as hot with the same infrastructure that the city of Phoenix has today? Certainly not. But, you know, I do think we've seen over time tremendous success and resilience of humans in living in a really wide range of environmental conditions. Do you feel the burden of making a place like Phoenix more livable? I mean, it occurs to me if you don't succeed in this job

in a few years, Phoenix is a place that's going to be a truly harder place to live for all kinds of people, including a young child that you just brought into the world. I do interpret it as part of our responsibility, both individually and our team

in the heat office and city government, to improve livability in the city. And I think that's everything from which splash pads are open when to how many streets have adequate shade to how long the cooling centers are open. So, yeah, I absolutely interpret that as part of our responsibility. We've been making the argument that those questions should be somebody's responsibility in city government. And in a case

of be careful what you wish for, here I am holding a piece of that. You know, in many ways, you are both at the forefront of this, all this thinking and this planning, and at the forefront of this extreme heed. And that's since you're a little bit of a key pioneer of response and adaptation in this new role. And I'm curious if you think overall, all of us are improving fast enough to meet that new reality. I think we've seen a good signal from the federal government of late that we haven't been moving fast enough and that we can move faster. Just this past week, we saw new funding opportunities from NOAA, the parent agency of the Weather Service, to support communities in their heat work. We have a National Hurricane Center. We have a National Severe Storms Lab. There's no such thing as the National Heat Center right now. And if heat

is one of our most consequential natural hazards from a public health perspective, some type of coordinated and centered federal entity might make sense. And I think this funding opportunity from NOAA is a good signal in that direction. We've also seen proposed legislation that would potentially open channels for FEMA to assist communities in preparing for and responding to heat events, similarly to how they do for other hazards. But I think it's very fair to say, as we look across the local, state, and federal government landscape in the U.S., that heat planning, heat investment are not where they could be and not where they should be based on the health data we're seeing.

So a gap persists. I'm just curious how it makes you feel that there's still a gap all these years. That's an interesting question. I don't know if I spend too much time contemplating how I feel about that other than being encouraged that the trajectory is positive. I guess I hold a sense of optimism that we are seeing steps, and in some cases, non-trivial steps in the right direction. The question, of course, that will literally be a matter of life or death for some Americans is, does that acceleration happen quickly enough? So a final question for you, Dave.

What is the forecast in Phoenix for the next few days and for the next week? Is it going to be another set of consecutive days over 110? If anybody likes looking at a consecutive string of triple-digit numbers, please tune into the Phoenix weather forecast. Unfortunately, it appears that the exclamation point on this current hot stretch is yet to come. I think we've hit 118 so far in this stretch, but 119 is in the forecast. Wow. So as we look into the forecast period, we don't see the end of this string or strong suggestions of it anytime soon. Hmm.

So you're going to be taking your baby outside in a stroller exceedingly early in the morning for the next few days. Or for exceedingly short periods of time. Well, Dave, thank you for your time. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Michael, and hope everybody is able to stay cool and stay safe.

Thanks so much. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Members of Congress, I have the high privilege and distinct honor to present to you His Excellency Isaac Herzog, President of the State of Israel. On Wednesday, the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, addressed a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress at a fraught moment in the relationship between the two countries, and a day after 10 Democratic House members voted against a resolution declaring support for Israel. Mr. Speaker, I'm not oblivious to criticism among friends, including some expressed by

respected members of this House. I respect criticism, especially from friends. Herzog acknowledged growing American criticism of Israel's current right-wing government, especially over its plan to reduce the power of the judiciary, a plan that has touched off massive protests in Israel and raised questions about the future of Israeli democracy. As president of Israel, I am here to tell the American people and each of you that I have great confidence in Israeli democracy. Although

we are working through sour issues, just like you, I know our democracy is strong and resilient. Israel has democracy in its DNA. In an interview with The Times published on Wednesday, President Biden urged Israel to stop trying to ram through its overhaul of the judiciary, suggesting that it could put the country's democracy and its relationship with the U.S. at risk. Today's episode was produced by Lindsay Garrison, Diana Nguyen, and Nina Feldman. by Lindsay Garrison, Diana Nguyen, and Nina Feldman. It was edited by Patricia Willans, fact-checked by Susan Lee, contains original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, Rowan Yamisto, and Chelsea Daniel, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Barbar borborough see you tomorrow