PHOENIX — Dozens of people have died from the heat at bus stops between 2020 and 2022, including a man with a body temperature of 109º, according to records from the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office.
The ABC15 Investigators are looking into hundreds of death records from 2020 to find where people are dying in the extreme heat as we could not find a government agency that’s tracking the exact details.
According to Maricopa County, 80% of heat deaths occurred outdoors with 228 of those deaths occurring in an “urban area,” but records do not indicate where outside.
ABC15 found at least 40 people have died at bus stops from heat and at least 48 others have died at benches, parking lots, or on sidewalks.
One report from August 2020 showed a man was transported to an emergency room with a temperature of 109.4º after being found at a bus stop in central Phoenix.
Phoenix’s Office of Heat Response and Mitigation is not officially tracking deaths to a specific location, but the director of the newly created office said he looked for patterns when he first started the job. “I wrote a little index card with a synopsis of each case and put them on the desk one at a time. So it's quite literally hundreds of index cards, and tried to sort them into different groups to understand what the circumstances are,” said David Hondula.
Hondula said his office has staff and volunteers for outreach of heat vulnerable groups, and officials need to look at what led a person to the bus stop, or parking lots, “as we hear that these... and read that these deaths are happening at bus stops, on benches, I think it's important to remember it's not necessarily the environmental condition of that individual feature of the landscape that was the cause of death, we tried to think about the exposure history that folks are experiencing.”
The city’s transportation department is also not tracking deaths at bus stops, or those who have passed out from the heat.
A spokesperson for Valley Metro also tells ABC15 that they are not tracking the number of deaths at bus stops.
Valley Metro says its bus operators are trained to recognize the symptoms of heat-related illnesses and will stop to check on riders if someone appears in distress. Bus operators will also call dispatch or a supervisor to request police officers or firefighters to check on an individual, however, they do not have data on how many times this has happened.
Buses can be used as cooling centers too, they add.
However, a spokesperson adds that all riders should have the expectation of having money to board the bus, but an operator may use their discretion to allow riders to board when there is extreme heat and an associated safety concern. “During the summer months, riders are allowed to stay on the bus in between trips and/or board early to find additional heat relief,” Valley Metro wrote in an email.
The City of Phoenix has 4,067 bus stops with 73% of them having shelter for shade.
The city has a goal of adding shade structures to 80 bus stops each year through 2027 with 516 shelters already being added since 2017. “The City prioritizes shelter/shade structures at bus stops that experience higher passenger ridership, so the percentile of riders being served is always higher than the percentile of bus stops shaded,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.
Stacey Champion, an advocate for the unsheltered, calls every heat death preventable and tracking where deaths are happening could be important across departments, “I think the more data you have, the better you can wrap solutions around those problems.”
