Seventy-two Hours Under the Heat Dome
Excerpt: A chronicle of a slow-motion climate disaster that became one of Oregon’s deadliest calamities. …Typhoon Champi caused no serious damage and no loss of human life. But a number of atmospheric scientists believe that it may be what gave the jet stream a snap. After the storm diminished, its force continued on, crimping the jet stream into a sharply curved band, or what meteorologists refer to as an omega block, because it resembles the Greek letter. This led to what’s called, colloquially, a heat dome, a high-pressure system in which hot air is trapped over a single geographic area. It stalled over British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon, sealing in the heat. ...In the course of the heat wave, the cooling shelters hosted fourteen hundred people overnight. At its peak, the convention center housed three hundred and eighty-five in a single night, not to mention dozens of dogs and cats, and a few rabbits—a temperature-controlled ark riding out the wave in a city blistering under the deadly reckoning of climate change. ...By the time temperatures cooled, at least ninety-six people would be confirmed by the state medical examiner to have died of heat-related causes, making this one of the deadliest natural disasters in Oregon’s history....