How to prepare for extreme heat

Extreme heat kills more people in most years than hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined, and it does it without any of the imagery. There is no damage to photograph. The deaths happen indoors, alone, over several days, to people whose air conditioning was broken or too expensive to run.

It is also the disaster where preparation is cheapest and where knowing one distinction — exhaustion versus stroke — genuinely decides outcomes.

The two conditions, and why the difference matters

	Heat exhaustion	Heat stroke
Skin	Cool, pale, clammy, sweating heavily	Often hot; sweating may have stopped
Mind	Tired, dizzy, headache, nausea	Confused, slurred, agitated or unconscious
Temperature	Normal or slightly raised	Above 104°F / 40°C
What to do	Cool place, cool water, wet skin, lie down	Call emergency services and cool immediately

Confusion is the line. Any change in mental state during heat is treated as heat stroke until proven otherwise. Do not wait to see if they improve, and do not give fluids to someone who is not fully alert. Recognising it.

Who is actually at risk

Not the people who feel it most. The risk sits with:

• Adults over 65, whose thirst signal and ability to sweat both decline.
• Infants and young children, who heat up faster and cannot act.
• People with heart, lung or kidney disease, and anyone on diuretics, beta-blockers, antipsychotics or antidepressants — several common medications impair temperature regulation.
• Outdoor workers and athletes, whose exertion outpaces cooling.
• People living alone without air conditioning, which is the single strongest predictor in heatwave mortality studies. The full risk picture.

Cooling a house without air conditioning

Block the sun before it enters. Closed blinds, blackout curtains or reflective film on sun-facing windows does more than anything done afterwards.

Close the house by day, open it at night. Once outdoor air is cooler than indoor air, open up and cross-ventilate hard, ideally with a fan pushing air out of a window on the shaded side.

Turn off the heat sources inside — oven, incandescent lights, computers, dryer. Cook outdoors or not at all.

Cool the person, not the building. Wet skin with a fan, cool showers, wet cloth at the neck and wrists. It is cheaper and faster than moving the air temperature of a house.

Sleep low and on the shaded side, since heat stratifies upward. The full method.

During a heatwave

1. Drink steadily through the day rather than in bursts, and do not wait for thirst.
2. Find air conditioning for a few hours — a library, a mall, a cooling centre. Even a short break resets the body’s heat load.
3. Shift exertion to early morning, and cut it entirely on the worst days.
4. Never leave a person or animal in a parked car. Interior temperatures rise dangerously within minutes, even with windows cracked and even on a mild day.
5. Watch the second and third night. The cumulative days are the dangerous ones, not the first afternoon.
6. Expect the grid to strain. Heatwaves and outages arrive together, which is exactly when a house with no AC becomes dangerous rather than uncomfortable.

The ZonaProtec monitor shows official heat watches, warnings and advisories in effect at a point you search, alongside the rest of the threats near you.