Some fish die-offs were reported in overheated streams. Shellfish were exposed by low tides that came during the hottest times of the day, leaving the creatures to steam onshore to their deaths. The 2021 heat dome wrought disastrous environmental effects.
The true toll is likely higher, as heat often exacerbates concerns like heart or kidney conditions but isn’t implicated directly in official death data. Nearly 100 deaths were reported in Oregon during the heat wave. Last summer, 157 deaths from heat-related illnesses were reported in Washington state most were recorded during the three-day heat wave that June. The extreme heat event that hit the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington, southern British Columbia) at the end of June 2021 was 3 C greater than the. “We were scrambling to catch up during the heat dome last year.” “You could see from our social media this year, we got out with heat messaging well ahead of this event,” Cunningham said. This year, state and local public health agencies fired off a flurry of heat messages many days before the temperatures spiked. “We’ve done our work to improve our systems.” Tuesday could be the hottest day in a weeklong heat wave that has hit the Pacific Northwest region, with temperatures in Portland, Oregon, forecast to potentially top 100 degrees. “From my experience, the heart dome - we saw it coming, but we didn’t have quite enough coordination to really get ahead of it,” said Rad Cunningham, a senior epidemiologist at the Washington State Department of Health, of the 2021 heat wave. This year, cool spring weather, which helped build a hearty mountain snowpack, buffered some of the recent heat, and officials said they were better prepared after hard lessons last year. Searing temperatures crumbled streets in Seattle, caused baby birds to jump to their deaths across the region, killed millions of sea creatures along the coastline and cost Washington state about one-fifth of its cherry crop. The town burned to the ground the next day. That same event established a record high in Canada, where Lytton, British Columbia, soared to 121 degrees. June 2021’s heat wave was “ virtually impossible,” according to some experts, if not for the impacts of climate change. The heat wave in the Pacific Northwest comes a little over a year after all-time records were smashed in Seattle and Portland, with high temperatures of 108 and 116 degrees, respectively. Temperatures this year were not expected to reach such dangerous levels, and local governments had spent the cooler months preparing for impacts - with some evidence that the new planning, while incomplete, was paying off.
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