PHOENIX — The season's first heat wave is already baking the Southwest with triple-digit temperatures as firefighters in Phoenix — America's hottest big city — employ new tactics in hopes of saving more lives in a county that saw 645 heat-related deaths last year.
The heatstroke treatment has made ice and human-sized immersion bags standard equipment on all Phoenix fire department emergency vehicles. It is among measures the city adopted this year as temperatures and their human toll soar ever higher. Phoenix for the first time is also keeping two cooling stations open overnight this season.
Excessive heat warnings were issued for Wednesday morning through Friday evening for parts of southern Nevada and Arizona, with highs in subsequent days expected to top 110 degrees F in Las Vegas and Phoenix. The unseasonably hot weather was expected to spread northward and make its way into parts of the Pacific Northwest by the weekend.
The Albuquerque mayor on Wednesday was announcing this year’s “Operation Cooldown,” which includes plans for cooling centers and the use of sprinklers at city parks for kids to keep cool. Officials in Maricopa County were stunned earlier this year when final numbers showed 645 heat-related deaths in Arizona's largest county, a majority of them in Phoenix. The most brutal period was a heat wave with 31 subsequent days of temperatures of 110 degrees F or higher, which claimed more than 400 lives.
The technique “is not very widely spread in non-military hospitals in the U.S., nor in the prehospital setting among fire departments or first responders,” Pugsley said. He said part of that may be a longstanding perception that the technique's use for all cases of heatstroke by first responders or even hospitals was impractical or impossible.
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