You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 177 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Gotta run for shelter/ Gotta run for shade
Reaction Guidelines for Cooling
This is a resource for cooling. The goal is to have procedures you can pick up off the shelf and start putting in place when it’s too late to avoid disaster.
San Francisco has inadequate and unequally distributed tree shade
Trees cover 15% of the city’s total area, making SF extremely low on tree shade compared with other large US cities. The majority of SF’s trees are found in 5 areas: Golden Gate Park, McLaren Park, Lincoln Park, the Presidio, and Glen Park. The majority of SF’s neighborhoods have less than 10% tree coverage. These include Visitacion Valley, Bayview Hunters Point, Excelsior, Outer Mission, Oceanview/Merced/Ingleside, Sunset/Parkside, Outer Richmond, Presidio Heights, Lone Mountain/USF, Marina, Japantown, Tenderloin, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, North Beach, Chinatown, Financial District/South Beach, South of Market, Mission Bay, and Mission.
This citywide lack of shade threatens the majority of SF during extreme heat events.
San Francisco does not have enough or adequate cooling centers
San Francisco has few official cooling centers (libraries, some Rec and Park facilities, and some community centers) and few unofficial cooling centers (movie theatres and indoor shopping malls). These centers are unevenly distributed and lack adequate space to accommodate the numbers in need during a heat emergency.
None of these centers are currently open during nights. Yet nights that don’t cool to below 80°F don’t allow the body to recover and increase deaths during heat events.
Most San Franciscans don’t have access to air conditioning
Most single family homes in SF don’t have AC. Most Victorians don’t have any kind of temperature moderation system save a fireplace. Newer condos have HVAC systems, but most newer condos are unaffordable for San Franciscans. Schools in SF do not have AC.
SF doesn’t have dependable energy for emergency cooling needs
During heat events, energy use exceeds the energy supply and we often get rolling blackouts or worse. In SF we have a limited number of generators that are multiple polluters (causing both air and noise pollution) and only reliable for the short term (a day or two).
SF doesn’t have the medical facilities to deal with a prolonged heat event
We have a lot of medical facilities, and some of them are some of the best in the world. But, according to data.sfgov (2021) the south and west have few facilities, spread far apart, and in locations with little to no shade and few cooling center options. The east and north edges of the city have no medical facilities. And one of our large facilities for at-risk populations, Laguna Honda, is in trouble and closing.
SF doesn’t have the water to use for cooling
Where water fountains, water play areas, creeks, rivers, lakes, and opened fire hydrants are often used for cooling in cities, the west is in the middle of a megadrought and there isn’t freshwater to spare.
Saltwater and brackish water can be useful for cooling, such as in canals and inlets. That is infrastructure SF has in very few places, mostly on the eastern shoreline, and mostly in industrial areas.
The systems SF has are not sufficient
SF does not have the capacity to respond equitably or adequately to heat events. And we’re going to have heat events. It’s already hot and it’s going to get much hotter.