Seattle temperatures climbed fast enough to push local officials and nonprofits into emergency mode on Sunday and Monday, opening cooling centers from Seattle to Olympia as the region endured a brief but punishing heat wave. Around the Puget Sound, temperatures ran as much as 23 degrees above normal for the date.
The sharpest readings landed in Olympia, where the city officially hit 92 degrees on Sunday and 93 on Monday, breaking the previous June 15 and June 16 records of 88 degrees for both days. The normal high for each date is 70, which helps explain why the heat felt so abrupt to people trying to get through ordinary routines without air conditioning.
At Sergio's Service Center, Samuel Bubenzer said the response was built around making a simple indoor escape available when the shelter doors closed at 7 p.m. The service center opened on Sunday and Monday, days it is usually closed, and offered water, Gatorade, popsicles, cooling packs and a place to sit inside. He said the program also kept paw guards and disposable pet dishes on hand so people would not have to leave pets exposed on hot concrete.
The need was spread across more than one kind of place. Olympia Mutual Aid Partners visited homeless camps in downtown Olympia and a 20-acre patch of woods called The Jungle, while The Family Support Center of South Sound welcomed families into its air-conditioned space. But the group said it was unable to do emergency outreach to people living outdoors, and Trish Hefton said it had already used up its cold and hazardous weather event funding during the winter months. She said more funding for heat emergencies would not arrive until July.
That gap matters because the danger of extreme heat is not new to the Northwest, even if this stretch was brief. A record-shattering heat dome in 2021 killed an estimated 1,200 people in British Columbia, Oregon and Washington, and another 2,000 people crowded emergency rooms in Washington after heat strokes or related injuries. Researchers in Portland also documented tent surface temperatures of 163 degrees and pavement temperatures as high as 195 degrees during that event.
Even so, the emergency picture this week was uneven. University of Washington Medical Center said its emergency departments had not seen an uptick in heat-related illnesses, a reminder that warnings, shelter openings and hospital caseloads do not always move in lockstep. The immediate question now is how quickly the region can turn this one-off response into something more durable before the next hot spell arrives.
