In Phoenix, Firefighters Battle an Invisible Inferno
On the hottest days, an additional engine is often dispatched to fight fires as a safeguard against the draining heat’s effects on fire crews.
“You just can’t go as long,” Captain DiCosmo said.
After a relatively mild and wet winter and spring, heat calls to the Phoenix Fire Department are higher this summer compared with last year, a department spokeswoman said. The department said it did not yet have precise figures, but a digital readout of all the active fire calls around Phoenix offered a glimpse. At 3 p.m. on Saturday, about one of every 10 calls was from someone overwhelmed by the day’s heat.
There was a dehydrated 69-year-old hiker who had to be wheeled off a trail near the cowboy-inflected town of Cave Creek. A homeless man who arrived at the hospital with a temperature of 106 degrees. People who burn themselves on the pavement, children who collapse at sports practice and, occasionally, apartment complexes that turn into ovens when an air-conditioner blows.
The call to help Deirdre came at 2:30 p.m. Two companions, who identified her for firefighters, had been wheeling her down the street said she had simply passed out in the heat, but paramedics saw telltale signs of an overdose and revived her with a dose of naloxone and took her to the hospital.
Source: The New York Times
