“I’ve worked with many people experiencing poverty who are living in terrible material conditions… bugs and mould in their apartment or not being able to have adequate food… those things deeply impact people’s mental health for the worse,” they say.
The extreme heat death review panel report, released last year, revealed 39 per cent of heat dome deaths occurred in multi-unit buildings, while social or supportive housing and senior or long-term care homes accounted for 10 and seven per cent of deaths, respectively.
The report also made recommendations about cooling, including incentivizing building retrofits that encourage active and passive cooling and requiring new developments to meet certain cooling criteria. However, these changes won’t likely benefit those living in existing multi-unit low-income housing anytime soon, Burdge says.
“There are thousands of people living in BC Housing buildings that were made before any new adjustments to the building code — we need to be retrofitting those spaces,” Burdge said.
In addition to working with vulnerable people who were most impacted by the heat dome, Burdge has seen the affect of extreme heat on chronic disease firsthand because she has Type 1 diabetes and lives in a multi-unit apartment building that does not have air conditioning.
People with diabetes can experience increased difficulty regulating their body temperature and staying hydrated. In addition to the physiological effects of hot weather, extreme heat can also damage diabetes medicine and equipment.
“Because my sugars were high, I had headaches, dizziness, confusion — I didn’t actually have the cognitive wherewithal to realize how bad the impact was,” Burdge said.
The BCCDC study found the mortality rate among people with diabetes who died due to heat-related causes was 1.10 times higher during the extreme heat event than during the same period in previous years.
