PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – Following a deadly heat dome in 2021 and a heat wave in 2022, local government agencies conducted a study on indoor heat to help those most at risk in the Portland metro area.
The study was a partnership between the City of Portland, Bureau of Emergency Management, Multnomah County Health and local affordable housing provider Home Forward along with heat experts Dr. Vivek Shandas and Dr. Dana Hellman of Portland State University.
“We as emergency managers and people working in public health, we make decisions on keeping people safe based on the weather forecast but we don’t have a good understanding of the relationship between the outdoor temperatures and the temperature inside the place where people live and spend most of their time,” City of Portland Chief Resilience Officer Jonna Papaefthimiou told KOIN 6 News.
The study looked at indoor temps in 49 units at three Home Forward properties from July to September 2022.
“We found out that temperatures inside most of the apartment buildings that we looked at go above 80 degrees for many days during the summer,” Papaefthimiou said.
The study says these temps are also over the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s indoor comfort standards and found most residents in the study experienced physical impacts from the heat including trouble sleeping, sweating, headaches and anxiety.
Additionally, the study found that the apartments and houses they researched stayed warmer in the evening than during the day.
The agencies developed short and long-term solutions to help Portlanders in need during heat waves — identifying those most at-risk as seniors and those with underlying health conditions.
In the short term, the City of Portland says portable air conditioners can help, along with having heavy curtains to block the light or using window screens to keep homes cool at night. As the city sets up heat shelters during extreme heat events, Papaefthimiou also suggests apartment buildings open a common room for residents to cool off if their apartments are too hot.
“We saw in our study that those kinds of simple interventions can help keep an apartment much cooler and people who did those were almost as cool as people who had an AC unit but didn’t do anything else,” Papaefthimiou said.
In the long run, the City of Portland says it needs to make changes to building codes and retrofit buildings to keep residents cool.
According to the City of Portland, the 2022 heat wave caused 71 deaths in the area, with five deaths from hyperthermia “underscoring an increasing risk of severe heat in our region every summer.”
“Climate change is an issue of equity for our time. The effects of heat are not equally distributed,” PSU’s Dr. Vivek Shandas said of the study. “Low income, older, and Black and Brown communities are consistently facing the greatest risks from hotter summers. We need to hear from these communities about what works.”