Rose, 62, was living in a remote area of Washington, west of Seattle, when the scorching “heat dome” of 2021 hit the Pacific north-west. As the house Rose shared with her then 93-year-old mother grew hotter, and their two air conditioning units struggled to make any dent on the wall of heat, Rose’s heart rate climbed, and she watched as all the rubber bands in the house liquefied.
The heat dome – which broke local records to reach highs of 120F (49C) – buckled roads, melted electrical cables and caused about 600 excess deaths, and research showed it was “virtually impossible” without climate change. It’s just one example of a worsening picture for US extreme weather driven by human caused global heating: including more frequent hurricanes, wildfires and devastating floods.
“The heat dome was one of the most terrifying things that I have ever experienced,” Rose said. The episode brought home to Rose that the climate crisis is not some risk on the horizon. “Oh no, it’s here right now,” she said. “Both of us could have died … It’s very, very scary.”
As Americans respond to the reality of the climate crisis the Guardian spoke to people who are adapting their living environments.
“I had to fill the bathtub with ice water and lay in it all day to survive,” Rose said, of the 2021 heat dome. She fashioned a mist-sprayer with a shower-head and electrical fan to keep cool. The next day, Rose recalls, “everything died on the beach and the stench was terrible – all the shellfish, oysters, mussels, everything was dead, and it stank for days”.
To avoid the house baking in future heatwaves, Rose acquired some 2in-thick insulation boards from a friend, and used them to weatherproof her office room as a refuge from the heat. She also bought a deep bathtub, which she fills up at the first sign of extreme heat.
A few months back, Shannon Tucker was sprucing up the home she has owned in Denver, Colorado, since 2020. “The guy who came to clean my gutters said, ‘Hey, you’ve gotta clean up your side yard, because you’ve got way too much debris and leaves and stuff,” she recalled him saying. “‘And that’s just like asking for a wildfire.’”
Tucker, 40, said “it was a wake-up call for sure” – as she realised that “this innocent thing I had been doing, putting my leaves in a pile in my yard literally touching my house” could be “fuel for a potential fire”. Now, she cleans the gutter at least every six months, and has installed air purifiers as well as solar panels at home.
Like many other states – including Texas, California, Wyoming, Oregon, Montana and more – Colorado battled major wildfires this year. Tucker, who works in tech communications, has noticed the fires getting worse – and creeping closer to Denver – in recent years, her phone pinging with increasing air quality alerts. When she moved to Denver six years ago, Tucker said: “I don’t remember experiencing going out for a walk and feeling suffocated by the air.”
What scares Tucker, though, is the prospect that individual moves alone cannot prepare for climate disaster – only collection action. “It’s frustrating because like, I can’t control what my neighbours do,” she said, whether it’s leaving out leaves that might act as wildfire kindling, or continuing to burn fossil fuels that contribute to making global heating worse. “You kind of feel helpless.”
Growing up on the Texas Gulf coast, Roxane Rolingson, now 71, was always aware of the prospect of hurricanes blowing in. “You didn’t worry about it even slightly outside of hurricane season,” she said.
In recent years, though, the weather where she lives in Corpus Christi, Texas, has become increasingly extreme. Now, “It’s getting hotter and hotter and hotter,” and hurricane season seems to last longer than ever.
In the past, when violent storms have rolled in, Rolingson and her husband have screwed boards of plywood over their 25 windows, an intense activity that will become increasingly burdensome with age.
So in autumn 2023, Rolingson said she invested about $20,000 in protective stainless-steel screens on all the windows. “Now, when a hurricane comes, we can leave it close to the last minute – and all we have to do is activate the corrugated shutters over the doors, then get in the car and drive away,” she said.
Rolingson said the screens were “horrendously expensive” but she was lucky that “I’m a middle-class retired person, so I can afford that. Lots of people [affected by the climate crisis] can’t.”
Rob Kirsch, in his 60s, bought his home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 12 years ago. “When we moved in we realised we’re dealing with violent thunderstorms,” he said. “We don’t get as much rain as, say, Seattle, which gets a slow gentle rain, but we get downpours, and the tail ends of any hurricanes that come up the coast.”
During an icy storm a couple of years back, Kirsch was drinking coffee and looking out the window. “We live in an old neighborhood, so we have big old trees,” he said. “My car’s parked in the driveway, and there’s a big old branch over it.” Something told him to move the car. Thirty minutes later the branch came crashing down. “It was amazing!” he said. But Kirsch worries about a tree crashing into his house.
“What we’ve noticed is the storms seem to be getting more severe,” said Kirsch, an artist and researcher at a law firm.
Kirsch is weighing up whether to replace his slate roof – which could cost $10,000 to $20,000 – before a storm pummels it away. He said over 12 years the family has already spent thousands on air conditioning ($10,000), new top floor windows ($10,000), attic insulation ($4,000) and basement flood-proofing ($10,000), a necessity due to his wife and son’s asthma.
But Kirsch recognized modifications like these are unaffordable for most households – despite those families needing protection even more, as they’re often living in row houses with flat asphalt roofs, susceptible to extreme weather. “There’s a lot of poverty here,” he said. “A lot of people are impacted by not having the sources to upgrade their houses in the way they need to.”
