Back in the summer of 2021, as Seattle recovered from a Pacific Northwest heat dome that left more than 150 people dead in Washington state, emergency managers zeroed in on a big reason for the city’s vulnerability to heat. Not only did most households in Seattle not have air conditioning, but the city also had few public cooling centers where people could escape from high temperatures. Because Seattle’s climate is typically so mild, many schools and libraries don’t have A/C, so they couldn’t serve as refuges the way they might have in other regions of the country.

In the two years since the heat dome, Seattle has installed A/C units in a few more libraries and recreational centers, and applied for federal grant money to expand cooling in other buildings. But even as they work to add more public cooling centers, emergency managers are running into another obstacle that hotter cities have been dealing with for years: Even if a local government sets up cooling centers, people often don’t go to them.

Part of the reason is economic. It’s one thing to know that there’s a library with A/C downtown, but it’s another thing to get there. If you don’t have a car, you either have to walk or wait at a bus stop in sweltering heat, which might be more dangerous than staying where you are. In the South, where most homes and apartments have A/C, cooling centers are designed to provide shelter to low-income and unhoused people, but these populations are often the ones that have the most difficulty making a crosstown trip.

The city of Tampa, Florida, encountered this problem when it opened three cooling centers during a recent heat wave. Over the course of a week, around a dozen people visited each center per day, according to the Tampa Bay Times, which quoted a woman who was too afraid to walk to the nearest center two miles away. The facilities could have accommodated several times more visitors. In other cases, people might just not know what their options are: A CDC study of two Arizona counties last year found that “barriers to cooling center access among older adults include awareness of location and transportation.”

But even when people have easy access to cooling centers, they still don’t go, says Kate Hutton, an emergency planning coordinator for the city of Seattle.

Read the full article about cooling centers by Jake Bittle at Grist.