HARTFORD, Conn. – When the weather warms up in Connecticut, Clarence Braun and his wife, Holly, park their Mercury Grand Marquis in the shade or ride around with the windows down trying to cool off.
"My AC is broken. I just drive if I can find some shade," Braun said.
He has lived out of the car for more than two years. But when it gets really hot, he seeks out some air conditioned relief.
"There's certain spots [that] got a little AC here. McDonald's, they got AC if you really need to cool down. You know, they don't much like it, but they allow it for a little bit," Braun said.
On a 92-degree summer day in July, Braun, wearing a short-sleeve red polo and his hair pulled back in a ponytail, visited the Connecticut Harm Reduction Alliance in Hartford, a city-activated cooling center that functions during heat waves. On this day, bottles of Vitamin Water and cold cut sandwiches were available.
The Alliance's Chief Executive Officer Mark Jenkins said the demand is higher during hot days and he brings on additional staff to stay open longer.
"We loaded a pallet of water in here yesterday. It's probably all but gone. That's 48 cases of 40 bottles inside a 12 hour period," Jenkins said.
Connecticut, a state that sees its first frost in late September and snowfall as late as April, is seeing drier and hotter summers due to climate change.
An extreme heat protocol for the state was established in 2021. It's triggered when there are three or more consecutive days of temperatures above 90 degrees.
So far this year, the state's heat protocol was put in place five times, up from three last year.
Extreme heat spreading nationwide
States seeing a rise in heat, like Connecticut, don't always have a summer shelter system in place, according to Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.
"There's always been in the Midwest and the East Coast the need to have those kinds of facilities for the cold. But now it actually is becoming almost a year round activity," Whitehead said.
Thirty years ago, Chicago experienced a record-breaking heatwave in which more than 700 people died.
That heatwave led to the formation of a city office which coordinates public universities, schools and libraries to function as cooling centers.
High temperatures are particularly dangerous in large cities, said Dr. Alexander Sloboda, medical director of Immunization and Emergency Preparedness at Chicago's Department of Public Health.
"You kind of have this urban heat island effect," Sloboda said. "So even though the environment cools down a bit, the concrete, the buildings continue to release the heat absorbed during the day into the evening."
Opening cooling centers during heat waves is providing relief to some, but people are continuing to die.
"This city is trying to provide more, either later cooling center hours, or even exploring 24/7 options as well," Sloboda said.
The impact of heat intervention
In parts of Arizona, one of the hottest states in the country, the "heat season" typically runs from May to October. Just this February, parts of Arizona saw temperatures in the 90s.
Eugene Livar, chief heat officer for Arizona, says that since last year, the state has opened nine around-the-clock cooling centers that operate during the heat season.
"Those could include for the unhoused, those that are house burdened or those that are seeking some relief because they may be housed, but they could be making some really critical decisions between [paying for] utilities and different needs that they have," Livar said.
These shelters are helping, Livar said. For the first time in nearly a decade Phoenix saw a small decline in the number of heat-related deaths.
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