On the afternoon of July 2, Tom Wolper sat in the Greenfield cooling center with a book open in front of him. The 66-year-old had come for one reason. “That’s why I’m here, for the cool air,” he said. His home air conditioner had broken down two months earlier, and he had not managed to replace it. It was his first day at the center, and he said he would not have traveled far to reach another one had the Greenfield Healthy Active Living Center not been open.
For nearly a week spanning late June and the July Fourth weekend, unrelenting heat gripped Pittsburgh. A heat dome parked over the eastern United States pushing heat indices toward 100 degrees and prompting Allegheny County to issue a Code Red heat advisory that eventually extended to July 4. The region is now baking under a similar heat wave, and the city has opened six cooling centers from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Allegheny County has been referring residents to the United Way Pennsylvania’s 211 site, which this week directed locals largely to a handful of libraries and volunteer fire departments. The county invited communities to add other cooling options to that resource. Its Department of Human Services and vendors are checking on older adults who receive some of public services, plus connecting with unhoused people and offering them shelter.
Climate researchers and advocates warn that weather patterns and long-term temperature trends may challenge the region’s resources and strategies.
Kelly Klima, a senior research engineer and policy professor at RAND, a nonprofit research organization, who led a 2015 study of Pittsburgh’s heat vulnerability during her time at Carnegie Mellon University, says the city “was lucky for a really long time. … “The luck runs out at some point. You can’t always draw the best cards out of the deck.”
She expects the strain to deepen as the climate warms, describing heat as “a chronic stress” that will “never really go away.”
Heat strains even a healthy body, said Dr. Maureen Lichtveld, dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, who has spent nearly four decades in environmental public health. It taxes the circulatory system and, above all, the kidneys. She counts four groups as most exposed:
- People with chronic conditions such as hypertension, diabetes or chronic pulmonary diseases, whose kidneys are already under stress
- Pregnant women
- Young children, particularly toddlers
- Older adults, especially those in nursing homes.
That last group, she said, “is always forgotten.”
Inside the cooling centers
By 2 p.m. on July 2, roughly 20 people had settled into the Greenfield center, most of them gathered in groups of four over poker and mahjong. Eight miles drive away, the Beechview cooling center occupied the basement level of that neighborhood’s senior center, where about 15 older residents sat talking over the iced coffee, water and lemonade the staff had put out.
The centers offered real relief, but they were senior centers first, serving a largely older clientele who were already regulars, rather than spaces built to draw in everyone at risk across a neighborhood.
Sue Pfeuffer, who serves on the advisory board of the Beechview Senior Healthy Active Living Center, came straight from a dialysis appointment. She has a window air conditioning unit at home, she said, but had not found the time to install it and planned to ask her children to do it soon. The nights, she added, have been hard to sleep through. She lives two trolley stops away from the center, and while she comes there often, the heat has kept her there for longer stretches than usual.
This week the city added the Mount Washington Healthy Active Living Community Center to its cooling centers, bringing to six the list that earlier in the summer included community centers in Beechview, Greenfield, Homewood, Sheraden and the South Side Flats.
Melinda McCormick, who directs the Beechview center, said the city designated senior centers as cooling centers based on staff availability and capability. Its bigger centers (the city has a dozen in all, though one is temporarily closed) have the capacity to host more people during the heatwave.
On July 3, when temperatures hit 93 degrees, the city tallied a total of 65 attendees across four of the centers:
- 13 in Greenfield
- 25 in Homewood
- 20 in South Side
- 7 in Sheraden.
According to McCormick and observations made by Public Source, most of the people making use of the cooling centers are seniors. She would be happy to broaden the demographics. “If you don’t have fans, this is where you should come,” she said. “We’re here to help.”
Info on other cool options is scarce
While the city activated its senior centers, Sunrise Movement Pittsburgh, a local chapter of the youth climate organization, was building something the official response did not offer: a single, comprehensive map of every free place in the region where a person can escape the heat.
Ilyas Khan, an organizer with the chapter, noted that Pittsburgh sits inside a county of 130 municipalities, and people in need of relief from the heat should be able to turn to a single map.
Khan described the map as a tool for the moments when official infrastructure runs out, like when someone is stranded at a bus stop in uncovered heat and needs to find the nearest library or cooled space fast.
How far a stranded rider can safely travel is itself a research question. Klima’s 2015 study assumed a vulnerable person could cover about 8/10 of a mile, roughly 15 minutes on foot, before heat exhaustion set in, a threshold drawn from a healthy adult’s limits that shrinks under direct sun. In Los Angeles County, where she now advises a regional climate collaborative, she said local officials have begun treating shade at bus stops as “low-hanging fruit.” The fix could be a tree, she noted, or it could simply be a covered place to stand.
Khan said he has been contacting local leaders directly to keep his map of cool spots current.
Eric Sloan, who directs CitiParks, described the city as already in “constant communication” with libraries and with other groups that want to help. The city does not currently have an online map of public, air-conditioned resources.
To Sloan, the challenge is less a missing map than shared clarity about who does what. “It’s important for us to be on the same page with understanding who is providing what,” he said, so that a resident in a neighborhood without an easily reachable city site can be pointed to the county or another group instead.
‘Heat island’ effect more intense in some neighborhoods
“Every city has an urban heat island,” said Neil Donahue, director of the Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research at Carnegie Mellon University.
The main driver is dark surfaces that soak up sunlight. “Black streets and black roofs” are why cities bake, he said, and the simplest fix is to brighten them with white or reflective roofs. Trees help by releasing water that cools the air, though because they also absorb sunlight, their effect is more complicated than it appears. In Pittsburgh, temperatures run a degree or two warmer than the surrounding countryside, he said.
The late June heat was several forces folded together. “It’s an El Nino, it’s climate change, and it’s the hot spell, and you put it all together,” he said. Individual events are still hard to forecast more than about 10 days out, he said, but the broad direction is not in question: A warmer climate makes hot spells more frequent, and residents should expect more of them. “You can pretty much bank on it,” he said.
Khan said he has studied the urban heat island effect in the city, and pointed to a geography of risk shaped by elevation, pavement and the presence or absence of trees. By his account, Downtown ranks among the most exposed areas, along with the South Side Flats, much of the Hill District, parts of Lawrenceville and the tree-sparse stretches of the East End, including East Liberty. Wealthier, leafier neighborhoods stay cooler.
Recent nights had stayed so warm, Donahue explained, because humidity traps heat near the ground. Water vapor absorbs it and slows its escape to space, so on a muggy night the temperature barely falls. “It’s oppressively hot at night, because the heat can’t get out,” he said.
The hours after the cooling centers lock their doors, at 7 p.m. can be a hidden danger. The human body needs to cool down at night to recover, Klima said, and when it cannot, “you are much more likely to be sick and hurt the next day.” For people who are older or very young, who live alone, who rely on insulin, or who have heart conditions that heat can push toward a heart attack, their risk is sharpest, she added.
If overnight “we go from 90 degrees to 75 degrees, that’s not a decrease,” said Dr. Lichtveld. The region’s housing stock compounds it. Many homes have no air conditioning, and Pittsburgh’s older, solid brick construction “cannot breathe,” she added, so the structure itself holds the day’s heat rather than shedding it.
For people living outside, especially the unhoused population, she said, a drop from 90 degrees to 78 is close to meaningless. She credited the city for operating cooling centers, but a few hours in a cooled room and a bottle of water do not undo the exposure. People in vulnerable groups do not become less vulnerable after dark, she said. “Their hypertension is there, their diabetes is there, their asthma is there. They continue to be pregnant.”
How much harm that causes is not well measured. Lichtveld said physicians are rarely trained to separate heat as a primary cause of illness from a contributing one, which makes it hard to know when heat belongs on a death certificate.
Khan called the day-use model the central weakness of the city’s approach and said Sunrise Movement Pittsburgh hopes to press Mayor Corey O’Connor’s administration to extend the hours, noting that for people who are unemployed or living on the street, the difference between an open door and a locked one can be life and death.
Overnight shelter in and around Pittsburgh has traditionally been provided through the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, which this week affirmed that unhoused adults could come to Second Avenue Commons, in Uptown.
Pfeuffer, the Beechview board member, said sleeping through the overnight hours had been a struggle, a reminder that the relief the centers offer ends precisely when many people go home to apartments that never cool down.
Khan said recent weather signals that these events will only grow more common, and that local governments are not yet prepared for a threat that is becoming an annual certainty rather than an occasional emergency.
Klima’s prescription for the city is to “walk before you run.”
A blanket rule that every home install air conditioning could backfire, she warned. If households all switched on new units during a heat emergency, the added demand could overwhelm the grid and trigger blackouts. Her study for Los Angeles County found a middle path: Cooling a single room rather than the whole house kept residents safe without collapsing the grid or spiking bills, an analysis she said Pittsburgh should run with its own utilities while collaborating with universities so that “data-informed policy can help save lives.”
Lichtveld would like to see a wider warning system, better communication and an effort to keep people out of the hospital by treating them as partners, rather than patients. “We can prevent people going to the hospital,” she said, through something as basic as hydration and shelter from the heat.
Donahue urged residents to look out for one another in the meantime, from directing anyone suffering in the heat toward a cooling center to keeping frozen water on hand for the delivery drivers, sanitation workers and other essential workers who have no choice but to be outside.
“If we want to keep our city running,” he said, “we have to keep them running too.”
Feixu Chen is an editorial intern at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at feixu@publicsource.org
This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.
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