A man cools off in fountain on the Rose Kennedy Greenway during a heat wave in Boston.
In early July, a heat wave claimed 74 lives in southern Quebec. Brian Snyder/Reuters

When temperatures in Montréal spiked, living alone proved to be deadly.

Cities around the globe felt record-breaking, red-hot temperatures this July: In the United States, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Algeria, Georgia, Armenia, Russia, Oman, and China, the thermostat reached all-time highs.

In the Canadian province of Quebec, a week-long heat wave was linked to 74 deaths, making it the province’s second-deadliest period of extreme heat since the summer of 2010.





So what went wrong this summer?

Most were men, living alone


Public health officials noted that Ontario takes longer to attribute deaths to heat, so these deaths may be reported later. But, a month after the heat wave, the Ontario death toll has stayed at zero. Others suggested that ownership of air conditioning is part of the picture: 85 per cent of Toronto residents have access to it, compared to 42 per cent of Quebec households.


Men living alone, especially those with underlying physical or mental health conditions and substance-abuse issues, counted for the majority of deaths. Almost all who died were over 60 years old. And the majority of deaths happened in densely built-up parts of the city—neighborhoods where heat-trapping concrete and sparse vegetation elevated the temperatures by around 5 to 10 degrees Celsius.


The fatal risk of isolation


As sociologist Eric Klinenberg found in his analysis of the 1995 Chicago heat wave, older people living alone were at the highest risk of dying in the heat, especially if they had weak ties to their surrounding community, were distrustful of their neighbors or lived in neighborhoods marked by disinvestment.

An elderly woman in a retirement home in Nice, France, where summer temperatures have been extreme this summer. (Eric Gaillard/Reuters)

Montréal’s heat plan focuses on outreach: City staff getting in touch with people whose bodies are the most vulnerable to breaking down in the heat. Once they make contact, city staff take people to cool places or provide access to medical attention. But these strategies rely on social interaction and connection. Family, friends or even neighbors need to be available and willing to check up on the most vulnerable.

Even when firefighters comb neighborhoods door-to-door, as they did in July, they cannot visit every single vulnerable person, and there’s no guarantee that older people alone in their apartments will answer the knocks. This is especially true for individuals with reduced mobility or lack of trust in their neighbors or city services.

The popularity of living alone and deadly heat



Single-person households are geographically concentrated. In the heat wave, we saw an overlap between where people are more likely to live alone and where people died from the heat. A total of 42 of the top 50 places in Canada where most people live alone are located in southern Quebec, where the heat wave killed 74 people.





The world is trending hotter

Editor and Montréal resident Fariha Naqvi-Mohamed wrote in the Montréal Gazette that resisting heat waves is a community effort. The city must battle the heat together under city sprinklers, having fun in public pools and sharing popsicles.


While climate scientists are careful to not attribute single weather events to climate change, the world is trending hotter and the heat waves are consistent with our expectations for more extreme temperatures more frequently.



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