The Federal Emergency Management Agency has never responded to deadly or damaging extreme heat. Environmental groups and labor unions are asking for that to change.
The massive heat dome that struck the Pacific Northwest in 2021 paralyzed the region. Emergency departments were overwhelmed. Roads buckled in the heat. Hundreds of people died.
That same year, Hurricane Ida barreled into the Southeast. Buildings were flattened in Louisiana. Hundreds of thousands lost power. At least 87 people in the U.S. died.
Both were deadly and traumatizing. But FEMA distributed billions of dollars and months of post-disaster support to states and families battered by Ida. Victims of the heat dome, on the other hand, received no federal support.
That difference stems from a longstanding convention: FEMA responds to natural disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes — disasters with major and obvious damage to physical infrastructure. But the agency has not historically responded to extreme heat. Now, a coalition of environmental nonprofits, labor unions, health professionals and environmental justice groups is asking the agency to change that. In a petition filed Monday, the coalition asks FEMA to add extreme heat and wildfire smoke to the list of disasters to which they respond.
“Hurricanes are terrible. Earthquakes are terrible. But actually, heat is the number one killer now of the climate emergency of any weather-related event,” says Jean Su, director of the Energy Justice Program at the Center for Biological Diversity and a leader of the new petition.
Climate change has intensified the risks of heat and wildfire smoke turning what was once a manageable seasonal problem increasingly dangerous and deadly, Su says. Last year, at least 2,200 people died from heat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though experts say that number is almost certainly a vast underestimate.
“If we’re actually looking at where FEMA can actually make the biggest difference, it would be targeting and focusing major disaster funding on actual health impacts and lives of extreme heat and wildfire smoke,” says Su.
FEMA’s guiding law, the Stafford Act, includes a list of 16 natural disasters that fall under the agency’s disaster-response purview. But the language of the act is designed to be flexible and inclusive of disasters not explicitly listed, says Samantha Montano, an emergency management expert at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. After some initial debate, FEMA was authorized to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, despite the fact that “pandemic” was not a listed disaster category.
“Everybody in emergency management was like, well, surely it was intended to cover that,” says Montano.
Heat is a different kind of disaster
But historically, the agency has not responded to extreme heat.
