Earlier research by the multi-university 3HEAT Study that modeled the effect of a heat wave plus grid failure on Phoenix (and also Atlanta and Detroit) has found that the risk of urban blackouts lasting at least an hour and affecting at least 50,000 households increased by 151 percent between 20. Still, those impacts are occurring more frequently. Well, there's a reason the United States hasn’t seen such an extreme mass-mortality event: For all its faults, the electric grid is surprisingly resilient to heat emergencies. With climate change, then, won’t living in a place like Phoenix get ever more precarious? After all, the hotter it gets, the more people have to run their AC, adding ever more stress to the grid. If this scenario were to unfold across Phoenix, according to a recent paper, half of the city’s 1.6 million people would need medical attention. There is no relief, and then suddenly there’s disaster: The grid fails, snatching away the AC that’s staving off mass heat illness. Even at night, the sweltering is relentless, thanks to the urban heat island effect: The concrete and brick of this metropolis absorbs the sun’s energy during the day and releases it throughout the evening.
Those able to stay home are cranking their air-conditioning while officials scramble to move the unhoused into cooling centers. For four days now, temperatures have soared past 110 degrees.
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