The number of heat deaths in Philly is dropping even as temperatures keep rising

Five heat-related deaths have been reported this summer in Philadelphia, the city health department reports, all of them in June.

The adage that one death is one too many notwithstanding, the total represents a continuation of a dramatic downward trend in heat fatalities in the city, despite the decidedly upward trends in temperatures and mugginess.

More heat and steaminess will characterize the next several days, and sultry conditions have been known to persist into September.

So far, however, the mortality numbers — the health department offered no details of the victims, only that they were all over 55 — track with those of recent years, in stunning contrast to those of the end of the 20th century.

In the 1990s, at least 361 heat-related deaths were recorded by the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office. In the last 10 years — a period in which four of the hottest summers in records dating to 1874 have occurred in Philly as the planet has continued to warm — the total is 42.

Could someone be doing something right?

Ironically, heat-health experts said, the June heat that climaxed with the first 100-degree reading in Philadelphia in 13 years may have saved some lives during the sizzling eight days at the end of July by acclimating people to sultry conditions.

“I guess it could have,” said Samuel Eldrich, medical director of the Temple Health-Chestnut Hill Hospital Emergency Department.

“It is impossible to determine for any specific heat event,” said climatologist and heat-mortality specialist Laurence Kalkstein, but “it is very possible that the early season heat wave did have” a positive effect on reducing deaths.

However, Eldrich noted that an “adaptive effect … typically would have to be for longer exposures.” For example, the way Southerners contend with hot summers. “I don’t know if a four- or five-day span in June would necessarily help or prep people for July.”

More likely, say health department officials and other heat-health experts, the comparatively low heat-related death totals this year — and overall in the 21st century — have to do with increased awareness of heat dangers and getting the message to the public.

That has a whole lot to do with Philadelphia.

“I think today, people are much more aware of the dangers of heat than they were back in the ’90s,” said Kalkstein, who helped Philadelphia develop a pioneering heat-warning system that later was adapted for use in other cities.

In 1993, Philadelphia recorded 118 heat-related deaths — more than triple the combined total of the last 10 years. It not only was a health crisis, it was a crisis of credibility, recalled David L. Cohen, who was then-Mayor Ed Rendell’s chief of staff. Cohen earlier this year stepped down as U.S. ambassador to Canada.

No one was dying in other cities that were just as hot. Philadelphia’s total was different because the city’s medical examiner, the late Haresh Mirchandani, changed the heat-death counting system.

Traditionally, the criterion for a heat death was a core body temperature of 105. Mirchandani held that in a deadly heat wave his investigators would never be able to get to all the victims in time to make such a determination.

He ordered them to look for forensic evidence, such as closed windows with fans operating, in deciding whether a death was heat-related. The primary victims were elderly people who lived alone.

“There was some legitimate questions,” Cohen said in a 2023 interview, “but we had what we thought were really legitimate answers.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that Mirchandani was correct, and as it turned out, the CDC’s “excess mortality” figures — the number of deaths above daily averages — paralleled the city’s counts.

One person who agreed with Mirchandani’s methodology was Edmund Donoghue, the Cook County, Ill., chief medical examiner in 1995, when 739 heat deaths were recorded in Chicago.

The shock of the 1993 death toll in Philly — which foreshadowed Chicago’s disaster, and Europe’s in 2003 — was the impetus for creating the city’s “state-of-the-art” heat-response system, Cohen said.

The program included setting up cooling centers and putting block captains on alert to check on elderly neighbors, launching a public campaign to advise people to open their windows if they didn’t have air-conditioning, and have the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging set up a heat hotline.

According to a 2004 study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the program saved 270 lives from 1995 through 1998.

The annual cost — a mere $100,000.

Through Sunday, the average Philly temperature stood at 77.6 degrees for the meteorological summer that began June 1, said Eric Hoeflich, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mount Holly.

That would put it on track to finish in the top 15 warmest summers. That’s despite an unusual run of 10 straight days of below-normal temperatures to start August.

That streak ended Monday, and the next several days will feature a return to typical August conditions, with highs approaching 90 along with uncomfortable levels of water vapor in the air that will inhibit cooling at night.

No measurable rain has fallen yet this month, but showers are possible Wednesday and Thursday.

While the conditions will not be extreme — and look considerably less ferocious than forecasts were suggesting last week — Eldrich said people should be aware that this isn’t the dead of winter.

“People still need to protect themselves,” he said, “by doing the right things: Stay hydrated, and remove themselves from the heat when possible.”