Impact of Heat Waves
Although comparatively little reporting is made about the health effects of extraordinarily hot conditions, heat waves are responsible for more deaths annually than more energetic natural disasters such as lightning, rain, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Supporting this conclusion, Karl Swanberg, a forecaster with the National Weather Service, reported that between 1936 and 1975, about 20,000 U.S. residents died of heat. This finding is also referenced in a publication of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, giving guidance on how to avoid health problems due to heat.
Read more about this topic: 2006 North American Heat Wave
Famous quotes containing the words impact of, impact, heat and/or waves:
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“Too many existing classrooms for young children have this overriding goal: To get the children ready for first grade. This goal is unworthy. It is hurtful. This goal has had the most distorting impact on five-year-olds. It causes kindergartens to be merely the handmaidens of first grade.... Kindergarten teachers cannot look at their own children and plan for their present needs as five-year-olds.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“For God was as large as a sunlamp and laughed his heat at us and therefore we did not cringe at the death hole.”
—Anne Sexton (19281974)
“With these I would be.
And with water: the waves coming forward, without cessation,
The waves, altered by sand-bars, beds of kelp, miscellaneous
driftwood,
Topped by cross-winds, tugged at by sinuous undercurrents
The tide rustling in, sliding between the ridges of stone,
The tongues of water, creeping in, quietly.”
—Theodore Roethke (19081963)