Last August, an elderly man named Ronald Davies was at home with his sick wife in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler. It was summertime. Their air conditioning unit had recently broken, and when investigators finally arrived to check on them, the temperature inside their mobile home was 102 degrees.
Davies and his wife were two of the 645 people who died in last summer’s record-shattering heat, according to records from the Maricopa County medical examiner.
Nearly half of those people lived outdoors without shelter, but public health officials and lawmakers are starting to pay more attention to the risk of dying indoors.
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