Despite promises, California doesn’t know how many people died in record summer heat wave
California’s Governor Gavin Newsom and the National Weather Service issued a joint statement on Friday acknowledging that the State of California, and particularly its coastal cities, will face continued impacts from the deadly heat, but they didn’t really seem to have any idea how bad things were going to be.
The statement said that the State of California expects to be in the “vast majority of areas affected” by the deadly hot weather by the middle of next week.
The statement also noted that, while there was “increased concern” over the weekend that the State may not know how many people have died from the heat, and the National Weather Service was in the process of developing a map depicting how people have been affected by the extreme heat, it was not immediately clear how many people died.
“At this point, it is impossible to know how many people have died or have been impacted across the state,” the statement said. “The National Weather Service and the Department of Public Health are looking into this, as well as other local partners, and working on their emergency response plans.”
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In order to see how many people were killed, the statement said that the National Weather Service must identify its sources — whether those were on the ground, by phone, via air and satellite — and its data.
California’s deadliest heat wave hit the state on Memorial Day weekend, bringing temperatures up to 102 degrees for more than a week and causing thousands of deaths.
But it turns out there’s not any way to know how many people have died due to the deadly heat.
There isn’t even a consensus on how many people have died from the heat. In the days after the heat wave, news sites like The Hill counted just a few thousand deaths caused by the record temps. However, a San Francisco Chronicle analysis of the same data determined that there have been roughly 1,600 deaths directly related to the deadly heat according to the state Department of Public Health.
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The heat wave was so deadly that researchers have found that, on average, more people have died from the heat every year from 1885 to 2015. That means that
