Pima County Medical Examiner Greg Hess at his office in Tucson, Ariz. Hess and another Arizona-based medical examiner are rethinking how to catalog and count heat-related deaths, a major step toward understanding the growing impacts of heat. Cassidy Araiza for NPR hide caption Greg Hess deals with death day in, day out.
Hess is the medical examiner for Pima County, Ariz., a region along the United States-Mexico border. His office handles some 3,000 deaths each year — quiet deaths, overdoses, gruesome deaths, tragic ones.
From April through October every year, Hess is confronted with an increasingly obvious and dramatic problem: His morgue drawers fill with people who died sooner than they should have because of Arizona’s suffocating heat. Pima is hot, but it’s not the hottest county in the country. Nor the biggest; the most humid; or the most populated.
But Hess and his team are at the country’s forefront in one key way: They have developed some of the most innovative strategies to accurately count the number of people dying from heat-related problems. Those efforts could redefine how the United States understands the growing cost of climate change, because right now, the human toll of climate-worsened disasters is dramatically undercounted. A small group of health experts across the country has concluded over time that thousands of Americans die every year because of climate-fueled disasters, like stronger, more dangerous hurricanes or heat waves so intense they obli.
