A new online tool from UCLA shows health risks from excessive heat don’t play out equally from city to city.
But a new online tool from UCLA – which lets the public search for related data by ZIP code – shows health risks from excessive heat don’t play out equally from city to city, with people living in some Southern California communities much more likely to end up hospitalized during a heat wave than their neighbors one ZIP code away.
Jimmy Torres, 42, takes a break from playing soccer under the intense sun at De Anza Park in Ontario on Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021. UCLA just released an online tool that allows users to see data on heat-related health issues in their communities. “We want neighborhoods to be able to see how heat is harming them right now,” said David Eisenman, a public health professor at UCLA who helped head up the project. “Our hope is that communities will then take this information and use it to push their representatives for more action – for immediate action.”There has been statewide data for some time showing how heat waves and hospitalizations are linked. But Eisenman said there hasn’t been a good way to see that data by neighborhood.
Next, the team collected data on days with abnormally high temperatures in each community during the same time period. In Southern California, that ranged from a low of 390 extreme heat days counted in San Diego County over that decade to a high of 712 in San Bernardino County. For starters, he said historically racist policies such as redlining, where non-White people were segregated into certain neighborhoods, now mean many of those communities still don’t have the same access to high-quality housing that has air conditioning or is energy efficient.
Officials say they’re already looking to the UCLA data to help guide their decisions about emergency planning.
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