Heat Dome Causes Surge in Emergency Room Visits

Emergency Room Visits Surge as Record-Breaking Heat Scorches Northeast

With a heat dome baking the eastern U.S., emergency departments in New England and the Midwest have seen a spike in heat-related cases

By Chelsea Harvey, Ariel Wittenberg & E&E News

People try to stay cool in Newark, New Jersey as residents of New Jersey and much of the Northeast experience the seasons first heat wave.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

CLIMATEWIRE | The Northeast U.S. is sweltering under its first major heat wave of 2024. Temperature records are toppling, emergency room visits are rising and experts say climate change likely bears some responsibility for the searing weather.

The town of Caribou, Maine, on the Canadian border tied its all-time record high of 96 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday. It also tied its all time maximum evening temperature with a low of 71 degrees. Across Maine, daily record highs were tied or broken in Houlton, Millinocket and Bangor.

Mount Washington in New Hampshire set a new daily heat record on Wednesday at 70 degrees. And Burlington, Vermont, saw its hottest low temperature on record for the month of June when the heat on Wednesday failed to drop below 80 degrees.

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Temperatures were higher overall in some parts of the Northeast than in South Florida with highs in the upper 90s. Some areas in the Northeast this week have seen the heat index, a metric combining both heat and humidity, climb into the 100s.

And it’s not over yet — the heat wave is expected to drag on into the weekend, likely overturning more records in the coming days.

It’s yet another reminder of the accelerating impacts of climate change, which is worsening extreme weather events and threatening human health around the world. Heat waves are happening more frequently, growing more intense and lasting longer as global temperatures rise. With it, the number of heat-related illnesses and deaths is climbing too.

The current event is the result of a phenomenon known as a heat dome, a persistent high-pressure system in the atmosphere that traps hot air beneath it like the lid on a pot. The ongoing heat wave is remarkable not only for its scorching temperatures — it’s also an unusually early and long-lasting event. The hottest temperatures across most of the country typically occur in July.

These conditions have clear links to global warming, according to the climate research and communication nonprofit Climate Central. Global warming has made the temperatures across parts of the Northeast and Midwest this week several times more likely to occur compared with a world in which human-caused climate change didn’t exist.

That’s according to the organization’s Climate Shift Index, a scientific tool that evaluates the influence of global warming on temperatures around the world. According to the index, temperatures on Thursday across much of the Northeast and Midwest were made at least twice as likely by climate change, while large swaths of West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana saw temperatures that were made three or four times more likely.

Meanwhile, parts of eastern Canada, including Nova Scotia, saw temperatures at least five times more likely to occur because of climate change.

Cooling centers have opened across the Northeast to provide respite from the blistering heat. Even so, emergency room visits for heat-related illnesses have surged this week across New England and the Midwest, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

On Monday, just 57 out of every 100,000 emergency department visits in New England were due to heat-related illnesses. By Tuesday, that number had jumped to 469 of every 100,000.

Similarly, the proportion of heat-related emergency department visits nearly doubled in the Midwest between Sunday and Tuesday, when 545 per 100,000 visits were for heat illnesses. Numbers were so high in the Midwest and New England regions that the CDC’s Heat Health Tracker website included a special icon in the regions to designate “that extremely high rates of heat-related illness were detected.”

As of Thursday, CDC and the National Weather Service advised that vast swaths of Ohio, Illinois, New York and New England were seeing “major” or “extreme” health risks from the heat wave, meaning that everyone in the area could be vulnerable to high temperatures. The agencies told people that “staying cool on these days likely requires staying inside with air conditioning if possible.”

“We are seeing people who are impacted acutely by heat, and dealing with people who have been exposed to heat for a few days, and the stress of heat on their body is leading to dehydration, heat exhaustion and other things that can make their underlying conditions worse,” said Caleb Dresser, an emergency physician at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston.

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