CLARKSVILLE — With a two-year time limit, the Clarksville Beat the Heat initiative is looking for ways to lower heat in the town and keep town residents safe from inevitably rising temperatures.
While there are many efforts to implement heat-reducing strategies in larger cities, Bronte Murrell is tackling the issues on a small town level.
Murrell was hired by the Town of Clarksville through a $192,000 Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs grant. The grant is funding the two-year program that allowed Murrell to join the town government as heat-relief coordinator.
The initiative is from Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute with the goal of helping communities respond to extreme summer heat.
“Ultimately the mission of this program is to really look at these public health impacts of extreme heat and really help make the Clarksville community more resilient to heat in the coming years,” Murrell said.
In Clarksville, extreme heat is defined at day temperatures of 90 degrees or higher and night temperatures of 68 degrees or higher.
Data from the IU’s Environmental Resilience Institute show that the number of extreme heat days in Clarksville is expected to more than double by 2050, due to increased greenhouse gas emissions.
To combat the heat and simultaneously prepare residents for it, Beat the Heat is developing a heat-management plan for the town with both long-term and short-term strategies.
Some efforts being made in the town include sending out heat alerts and protecting vulnerable communities.
Murrell said that the town is working with Clark County Emergency Management Services to send out alerts about incoming heat waves to residents’ cellphones and landlines.
These alerts, along with other measures, are also intended to help vulnerable communities such as elderly people, young kids, people with disabilities, low-income communities, people experiencing homelessness and outdoor workers.
One thing Murrell said Beat the Heat has learned from surveys and focus groups is that there are higher rates of hospitalization and ER visits from heat-related illnesses for individuals with long-term disabilities.
She mentioned that Beat the Heat is looking at implementing a kind of check-in program for people who are more isolated and living alone at home.
Murrell cited sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s work called “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago,” who researched who the several hundred individuals were that died after a 1995 Chicago heat wave.
“They were largely people who were isolated and largely people who were older adults. And that is because they did not have communications systems for people to check in on them to make sure they were doing OK,” she said.
Another vulnerable group the initiative is trying to support is the homeless population.
They are looking for the best way to provide people experiencing homelessness with supplies for dealing with the heat like water, fans, sunscreen and electrolyte tablets.
The Homeless Coalition of Southern Indiana is on Clarksville’s Heat Relief Task Force. Executive director of the coalition, Leslea Townsend Cronin, said that they have been a part of the task force since it was created.
Townsend Cronin said the coalition has partnered with Beat the Heat to give the town feedback from the homeless population in regard to what they do when the weather begins to get hot.
Murrell and Townsend Cronin both said that they are looking into what a heat shelter would look like for the region.
There are no homeless shelters now at all in Clarksville, Murrell pointed out.
In winter months, the coalition hosts a white flag shelter if the temperature gets below a certain point. They are considering what it would look like for a similar shelter to be started for heat waves, which would be called a red flag shelter.
Townsend Cronin said that creating this heat shelter falls in more of a gray area than the white flag shelter.
“It’s a little different than white flag. White flag is over the course of four hours at night. With the red flag shelter it’s daytime hours, and it has to be a certain span [over] a course of days,” Townsend Cronin said.
She also noted that they are considering how to best serve all people who might need help during the heat, not just those without homes. This could include people without air-conditioning or people relying on fans that stop being effective when it reaches a certain temperature.
Murrell said that they would love to find a space in town where they could host the heat shelter. Right now, Townsend Cronin said that the coalition does not have the funding on its own to open a shelter like this.
Another takeaway Murrell mentioned from the surveys and focus groups is that a third of the participants noted having barriers to air-conditioning and cooling, with the number one barrier being costs of bills and repairs. On a larger scale, Murrell said they are looking at ways to combat the effects of urban heat islands, or areas that experience higher temperatures.
By creating a heat map of the entire town, they determined that some of the hottest locations are around Lewis and Clark Parkway and around I-65 along Eastern Boulevard.
“Because that’s where we’re seeing more parking lots, large dark rooftops, really these impervious, dark surfaces that are retaining more of that heat from the sun,” Murrell said.
One way to offset the effects of the heat islands is by increasing the number of green spaces.
“Trees and green space are going to have the best cooling effect because they release water vapor into the air,” she said.
Certain types of rooftops can also contribute to heat retention. Murrell recommended that having a rooftop painted white or opting for roof materials like metal will reflect heat.
She also noted that these roof options, along with planting more trees around houses, can save people money on their energy bills.
Murrell said that the IU’s Environmental Resilience Institute is taking the heat map and overlaying it with demographic data to better learn what groups are being affected by the urban heat island phenomenon.
While these heat islands do not directly contribute to global warming, Murrell said that the effects of heat islands are exacerbated by global warming.
“As we see rising temperatures in the coming years due to climate change, those impacts of the heat island are going to be more pronounced,” she said.
In addition to planting trees and being more conscious about construction materials, Murrell said the individual worried about climate change can also look for alternate modes of transportation. Decreasing automobile use results in fewer carbon dioxide emissions.
Because the program will end in 2023, Murrell said that the last six months of the program are focused on continuity planning. “So for some of these strategies we get off the ground this summer, how do we make sure that they have a home next year? And for some of these longer-term strategies, what department should we really look at taking up responsibility of implementing these as well,” she said.
“Beat the Heat will be dissolved as of next year, but the goal is to spend a lot of time preparing for that and making sure that these strategies can continue to be effective.”
Working in a small town of about 20,000 residents, Murrell said that there is a lot more communication between different government departments.
“We’re able to tackle some of these strategies in a shorter term, whereas if you’re in a larger community it might take more to put some of these strategies that we’re looking at together,” she said.
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