'Her body temperature was 106': How heat is killing Americans in their homes

0:00An exclusive NPR investigation finds that many more people are dying from heat each year than previously known. And one of the biggest risk factors is living in manufactured or mobile homes. Arizona is at the epicenter of the problem. NPR's Alejandra Barunda reports. Tar againer and her mom Sherry Petty lives together in this little blue trailer on the outskirts of Tucson. Her mom had bought it back in 1994. One acre. We had, you know, nice trees, you know, perfect desert setting. My daughter had a swing set in the yard. Petty was the kind of person who took her friend's son to doctor's appointments when their car was on the fritz. The one who showed up to choir practice every week. The host who piled her Thanksgiving table high, even though she didn't have much money. We'd have a turkey, we'd have pies, we'd have my green bean bag mashed potatoes. But Petty's life wasn't easy, especially during summer when Tucson gets really hot, like well over 100 most days.

1:00Getner and Petty had window AC units in their rooms and a swamp cooler in the living room. But it was hard to pay the bills to run them enough. And last July, there was a stretch of days when it was over 100 degrees. My mom's air conditioner in her bedroom is a quit working. And a few days later, the swamp cooler stopped working too. Petty made some calls to several county and private programs asking for help fixing the cooler, but no one could come. So she and her daughter toughed it out. Okay, well, we're used to heat. We're in Arizona, right? But even for people used to heat, long stretches of it can be really dangerous, especially for older people. Are those with health conditions like diabetes or heart disease? Petty checked all those boxes. And then, getner says one morning, I woke up, covered his sweat. I went to the kitchen. It's good to drink. And my mom's laying there on the floor. In front of the swamp cooler, there's a loin hot air.

2:03And a rotating fan is loin hot air. It was hotter inside the trailer than outside. I got the pair of mechs up there and the first thing they said, why is it so freaking hot in here? They took Petty away in an ambulance. She had gone to cardiac arrest. It was caused by a heat stroke in which her body temperature was 166 degrees. Sherry Petty died later that day. She was 76 years old. And deaths like Petty's are probably happening more often than official records show. An MPR investigation finds that roughly 9,000 people die to your cross the country, in part because of heat. And Arizona is at the heart of this crisis. Patricia Solis is a Geographer at Arizona State University. When she moved to Arizona in 2018, Maricopa County alone was reporting well over 100 heat-related deaths a year. If you had that amount of casualties every single year, it just is too many.

3:06It becomes a crisis. She says, imagine a hurricane ripping through your community every year. Only bigger. And that's really what we were feeling as a community. Solis wanted to help. So she asked two questions. Who was dying and why? As a Geographer, she uses maps to smooth out patterns that might otherwise be invisible. And she thought she could do that with data. The one day, she gathered researchers and local officials together in a big room. And she projected a map of the Phoenix region up onto a big screen. She added a dot for each heat-related death. And then other dots showing places where people got help paying bills to keep their ACs running. We noticed something that there was this part of the metropolitan area where there were quite a few locations of heat-associated deaths, but no assistance. But at the time, the team didn't understand why that pattern existed until Solis found herself driving on a Phoenix freeway a few days later.

4:09I was driving up on the 101 and being the Geography nerd that I am, I always use the satellite data when I'm driving. Something got our eye on her Google Maps. There was this white splotch on the satellite data right in that same spot. And I go, that is exactly where we were looking. Exactly. Where she and the other researchers had seen that cluster of deaths. What is that? And I almost drove myself off the road because I was just trying to zoom in. I'm like, what is this? What is this? That blotch was a mobile home park. After that, a ha moment. Solis learned that people living in mobile homes often have a hard time accessing financial help to pay their electric bills to keep the ACs running. Eventually, she and her colleagues figured out that in the Phoenix area, people living in mobile homes were six to eight times more likely to die from heat than people in traditional homes. About 300,000 people in Arizona live in such housing, like Sherry Petty in Tucson. Millions of others across the country do too. And the homes themselves can be part of the problem.

5:10Mark Kier is a geographer at the University of Arizona. He says there's actually a lot of newer manufactured housing that's built really well. But a lot of those older homes aren't. They really were not designed for the extremes of the U.S. climate, whether or not we're talking about somewhere up in Maine or down here in the summer months in Arizona. Those older manufactured homes can be in bad shape, bad wiring, poorly insulated, thin metal on the outside, unsealed windows. Kier says it's also about who lives in them. Residents are often older, they're sometimes sicker, and frequently Kier says they're already near the financial edge. And if you're concerned about paying your utility bills maybe you're less likely to run your AC quite as much. Or maybe you don't have the buffer that you might need to pay for that repair of the air conditioning system. That's exactly what happened to Sherry Petty. Karina Martinez works on the City of Tucson's heat programs. When she was a graduate student at ASU she interviewed dozens of very low income families

6:12in mobile homes about how they handled heat. One thing came up over and over. They might have cooling systems. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're able to use them because electricity is expensive. Really expensive. Five or $600 a month or even higher for people making less than $12,000 a year. One man Martinez interviewed said his best option was to buy a bag of ice after work. Dump it in the tub and just put on the tab on the tub and spend the rest of the evening there. Just a cool off. Kier says there's also something else making all this harder. Climate change. Ironically we think climate change is a matter of the outdoors. It's about what's in the atmosphere. But paradoxically we need to be much more concerned about those indoor human controlled environments because of climate change. Tara Gantner is all too aware of that. She knows that Tucson's heat can be dangerous and she has a message she wants everyone to hear. He's sure this not just happened outside.

7:12It happens inside the home too. You've got to make sure you got sufficient cooling. Cherry Petty died in the heat and her daughter Tara says she doesn't want anyone else to have to lose someone that way. Alejandra Burunda and PR News. You can see in PR's investigation on heat deaths including graphics at npr.org slash heat deaths.