Vermont Heat Wave Was State's Worst Weather Disaster Since Irene

 A week of sustained heat scorched this hosta in my St. Albans,
Vermont yard. The hosta was adequately watered throughout, but
the heat curled and dried out some of the leaves.

Last week's heat wave killed four Vermonters, making it the worst weather disaster to strike the state since the catastrophic floods with Hurricane Irene in 2011. 

Irene killed six Vermonters. Unlike Irene, the heat wave last week caused damage in the state somewhere in the range between minimal and non-existent.

Thus, there was little media attention to this latest weather disaster.

Unlike in Irene, viewers of national news had no word of our heat disaster - no footage of people mourning the loss of some of our iconic covered bridges, no images of plucky residents of devastated, isolated small towns reaching out to help their neighbors, no FEMA, no disaster declaratioms.

Though, as an aside if the current dry conditions continue to intensify in Vermont, we might find ourselves declared under an agricultural disaster zone, as drought could eventually ruin crops. But that's not an immediate threat.

Heat waves, as I have frequently noted, are not photogenic, like catastrophic floods are. So they don't garner as much media attention as more dramatic events would, like inundation, tornadoes and hurricanes.

Hot spells are in general the deadliest type weather event. On average, more people die from heat annually than from floods, tornadoes and hurricanes.  But we here in Vermont are not used to seeing heat deaths during the summer. We usually don't have enough hot weather to kill people.

However, heat kills in the Green Mountain State, and this July certainly wasn't the first time and won't be the last.   Two people in Brattleboro died of heat-related problems during a brief but intense June, 2017 heat wave. 

A Vermont State Police trooper died of heat stroke during a 2015 training exercise. And in 2013, a logger died of heat stroke while working during a record hot day. 

I'd been afraid that the heat wave would prove fatal in Vermont. As I've noted previously, at least 74 people died in Quebec from the early July heat. 

It's certainly possible more heat waves will strike the Northeast, including Vermont this summer. (Early next week looks like it might be brutal.) So, just like when winter weather turns especially harsh, we have to watch out for each other when it gets very hot.

Or at least try. My 89-year-old mother largely ignored my increasingly strident edicts demanding she get to the cool basement with her cat. My sister ended up dragging mom, kicking and screaming to air conditioned buildings for heat breaks.

Like most of us, I whined about how how it was and lamented the heat damage to my hostas, as the torrid weather kept grinding on. I was pretty much literally sweating the small stuff.

But the Vermont deaths in early July prove that any kind of weather can be deadly, if there's too much of it.