Andrea Cribbs, 40, holds her dog, Tinkerbell at a respite center in downtown Phoenix on July 28, 2023. Tinkerbell was given booties so he can walk outside without burning his paws on the pavement.
This has been Phoenix’s July in hell — an entire month of merciless heat that has ground down people’s health and patience in the city of 1.6 million, while also straining a regionwide campaign to protect homeless people and older residents who are most vulnerable.“I’m so sick of this,” Rae Hicks, 45, said this past week as she sat with her 7-year-old son on the floor of a clammy cooling center in Tempe, their suitcases clustered around them.
“It’s wearing on people,” said Kevin Conboy, a physician assistant with Circle the City, a medical charity that treats homeless people across Phoenix. “Everyone’s temperatures are hovering at 100. Everyone. is complaining of feeling so fatigued, and tired.”Even the group’s mobile medical buses are succumbing to the heat, forcing them out of service to get repaired.
“We are very full,” said Dr. Kara Geren, an emergency-medicine doctor at Valleywise Health Medical Center in central Phoenix. “We have everything from heat cramps to heat stroke and death.” Even the local news media seemed to hit a breaking point this past week, when The Arizona Republic cried out: “Will the inferno never end?”
Many of Phoenix’s shelters are full, and waiting lists for publicly funded housing are weeks or months long, families said in interviews. They find Davis’ number scrawled on whiteboards at cooling centers, get it from shelter employees or other people on the street, and call in a last bid for help. On Thursday afternoon, he had 268 unread text messages.
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