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How do heat waves impact health in your Southern California neighborhood?

When the mercury spikes, as it’s expected to across Southern California this weekend, a growing body of data shows that so do hospitalizations and deaths.

More attention is being paid to that link as climate change leads to more frequent and extreme heat waves. California created an “extreme heat” action plan this spring, for example, while Los Angeles recently became the third city in the country to hire a chief heat officer.

But a new online tool from UCLA – which lets the public search for related data by ZIP code – shows health risks from excessive heat don’t play out equally from city to city, with people living in some Southern California communities much more likely to end up hospitalized during a heat wave than their neighbors one ZIP code away.

Take the South Bay. In portions of San Pedro, the tool shows that emergency room visits spike during heat waves to 3.7 times the normal rate, with an extra 22 people going to local hospitals on average each day temperatures remain abnormally high. But 5 miles over in Rancho Palos Verdes, emergency visits were only one time the usual rate, with just four extra patients each day.

In the Inland Empire, residents who live in Fontana or Moreno Valley are much more likely to end up at the hospital during heat waves than residents of Rancho Cucamonga or Redlands. And in Orange County, portions of Anaheim and Santa Ana see bigger spikes in emergency room visits on hot days than Anaheim Hills or Irvine.

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Researchers hope this data sheds more light on how climate change is a social justice issue, with Southern California’s Black and Latino communities disproportionately impacted by rising temperatures.

“We want neighborhoods to be able to see how heat is harming them right now,” said David Eisenman, a public health professor at UCLA who helped head up the project. “Our hope is that communities will then take this information and use it to push their representatives for more action – for immediate action.”

Local data needed

There has been statewide data for some time showing how heat waves and hospitalizations are linked. But Eisenman said there hasn’t been a good way to see that data by neighborhood. So UCLA’s Center for Healthy Climate Solutions and its Center for Public Health and Disasters teamed up to fix that, with a beta version of their online tool released Monday.

People can enter their ZIP code on the site, use a drop-down menu to search by county or simply click on portions of the statewide map to pull up local data. Those who want to dive in deep can download data sets, layer in demographic factors and set up comparisons between communities. And since the tool is still in the testing phase, Eisenman said they hope people will try it out and offer feedback so they can make it as useful and user-friendly as possible.

A new online tool from UCLA maps out how emergency room visits disproportionately spike across Southern California communities on abnormally hot days. (Graphic by Kurt Snibbe, SCNG)
A new online tool from UCLA maps out how emergency room visits disproportionately spike across Southern California communities on abnormally hot days. (Graphic by Kurt Snibbe, SCNG)

To build the tool, researchers gathered data on emergency room visits for every California ZIP code each summer from 2009 to 2018. They didn’t just look at E.R. visits for obvious heat-related conditions, such as dehydration or heat stroke. Instead, they got data on visits for all internal issues, from cardiac events to breathing issues to diabetes. That’s because Eisenman said excessive heat has been shown to potentially worsen symptoms in people with all of these conditions, which means that focusing only on heat stroke data has likely led to drastically underestimating health risks related to heat waves in the past.

Next, the team collected data on days with abnormally high temperatures in each community during the same time period. In Southern California, that ranged from a low of 390 extreme heat days counted in San Diego County over that decade to a high of 712 in San Bernardino County.

Finally, researchers layered those two data sets together. That revealed a clear pattern in most ZIP codes of hospital visits spiking each time temperatures soared, with a total of 8,222 excess emergency room visits daily across California each time there’s a heat wave.

In Newport Beach, that’s added up to an extra 2,660 E.R. visits over those 10 years. In one Ontario ZIP code, it’s an extra 13,283 visits.

Disproportionate impacts

So why is heat impacting lower-income and diverse communities so much more than others? Multiple factors are to blame, according to Eisenman.

For starters, he said historically racist policies such as redlining, where non-White people were segregated into certain neighborhoods, now mean many of those communities still don’t have the same access to high-quality housing that has air conditioning or is energy efficient.

At the same time, residents of these communities tend to have more pre-existing health conditions, such as heart problems and diabetes, which can be exacerbated by heat waves.

These neighborhoods also are less likely to have trees or manmade structures to help create shade. That’s one reason Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti set a goal to plant 90,000 trees across the city. But Eisenman noted it’ll take a decade or more for those trees to grow large enough to really start helping address heat issues in the city, with more immediate fixes needed.

Officials say they’re already looking to the UCLA data to help guide their decisions about emergency planning.

“This is a unique health and heat risk map that will help the city of L.A. support and service the most vulnerable areas exposed to extreme heat so that we can prioritize the mitigation and adaptation measures where they are most needed,” said Marta Segura, chief heat officer for Los Angeles and director of the city’s Climate Emergency Mobilization Office.

Eisenman said he’d like to see community groups, health workers and neighbors make plans to identify residents in their community who are most vulnerable to heat-related illness, then make plans to knock on their doors during heat waves to make sure they’re staying hydrated and cool.

He’d also like to see those cooling centers set up in more desirable locations, such as area shopping malls, with easy transportation options available.

And he encourages residents to push for more action by printing maps from the UCLA site showing risks in their local communities, sending those maps to their elected leaders and asking what they’re doing to address heat-related health risks.

“We expect that we will see more heat emergencies if we don’t act now,” he said.


Source: Orange County Register

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