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Olivia Melo grew up in a third-floor tenement in New Bedford where the linoleum floor in the stairwell served as the only relief from heat in summer. She recalls her mother coming home and laying there to cool off.
Today, Melo works as the city’s library director, in an air-conditioned office at New Bedford’s main library. The building serves as one of the few places residents can come to cool off when temperatures in the city become dangerous.
The library will be open as a cooling center this week, as New Bedford faces a “prolonged and dangerous heat wave” Wednesday through Saturday, according to the National Weather Service, with forecasted heat indexes of 95 to 108.
New Bedford gets extremely hot in the summer months. In August 1975, the temperature peaked at 107 degrees Fahrenheit — the hottest ever recorded in Massachusetts. From 1893 until now, there have been only about 30 years where temperatures in the city did not reach 90 degrees or higher at some point.
“I can’t imagine being in a third-floor tenement today without proper cooling,” Melo said.
Temperatures are rising globally, and prolonged heat waves are creating higher risks for people’s health. In many cities, including New Bedford, “heat islands” make the problem worse.
Heat islands are pockets in cities that retain even more heat than average, often because they have a lot of asphalt and concrete and not many trees. In New Bedford, heat islands are concentrated in the city’s North End, especially along Acushnet Avenue, and near the South End peninsula, which the city determined lacked tree canopy.
This year, the city is expected to experience seven days when the heat index, or “feels like” temperature, will exceed 95 degrees. This number is expected to increase to 15 days within 30 years.
Who is affected?
When heat waves last a long time, they threaten people who can’t remove themselves from the heat. Outside workers, older residents, children, unhoused people, and people with medical conditions are particularly vulnerable. But some residents don’t have air conditioning or can’t afford to use it.
To prepare for extremely hot days, residents can stock up on Gatorade or Pedialyte to hydrate, said Christine Snow, director of emergency services at SouthCoast Health. She recommends not working when the heat index is high and using a fan.
Brenda Mayo, a city resident, has air conditioning in her home but said she sometimes uses a fan instead and takes cold showers to keep the electric bill down. Resident Shukanga Ayuso agreed, but said when it gets to a certain temperature, “you need to put that AC on.”
Persuading people to take action to prevent overheating can be tough because it’s an invisible problem until it’s too late, according to Chad McGuire, an environmental law and policy professor at UMass Dartmouth.
“The longer you’re exposed to that level of heat, you don’t realize that your internal body temperature is rising to a point where it’s serious,” said McGuire.
That’s also true long-term for a city or a society. Preventative measures address future issues, so some people might not view heat mitigation as a priority and want to address more immediate societal challenges, McGuire said.
“It’s like an amorphous monster,” he said. “It’s this thing that will accumulate over time.”
What New Bedford is doing this week
New Bedford takes action against heat every summer, and it also has a long-term heat plan.
The city is gathering heat-related data, said Michele Paul, director of resilience and environmental stewardship, and preparing to apply for a grant for a city-wide heat evaluation.
In the meantime, it is adding misting stations in pocket parks, said Paul. Splash pads, to give kids a break from heat, are located in nine city parks.
This week, because of the heat wave, the city is extending lifeguard coverage on East Beach and West Beach to 7 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday. It is also reminding seniors that the Buttonwood Park Senior Center, which is air-conditioned, is open Wednesday and Thursday from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
During heat waves, the city also opens cooling centers where people can cool off, including all five public libraries. All libraries except Casa de Saudade will be open this Friday, the city said in a press release.
“It’s a Band-Aid,” Paul said of the cooling centers. So she’s also thinking ahead.
What the city is doing long-term
To get ready for a hotter future, the city is implementing green infrastructure, which is a form of stormwater management that mimics the natural water cycle by absorbing and filtering water. This can include tree planting, green roofs and permeable pavements (which absorb water). These also mitigate heat effects.
Paul said she is focused on creating more resilience hubs in the city, which would be “that place where people come, and they get information.”
Groundwork SouthCoast, a local environmental nonprofit, has planted trees — particularly near Acushnet Avenue and Riverside Park — and added garden beds and painted basketball courts at the park.
Garden beds can cool an area down by about 20 to 30 degrees, depending on what’s being grown in them, said the nonprofit’s impact director, Eric Andrade.
While planting a tree outside a house might not cool it down extensively, it will still help, and “every degree counts,” Andrade said.
New Bedford’s resilience plan lists climate and emissions, energy efficiency incentives and green infrastructure as three of its 11 focuses on its website. The city’s 2025 hazard mitigation plan also incorporated resilience, sea level rise and heat for the first time, Paul said.
Reaching out to landlords and giving them incentives to make their buildings more energy-efficient is another priority, Paul said. State laws require landlords to provide residents with heating, but not cooling.
“The customer pays the utility bill, so the landlord doesn’t really have any incentive to make [the building] more energy-efficient,” Paul said.
The city spreads information about MassSave and Massachusetts’ free programs for weatherization — insulating a building to protect it from outside elements. This helps people save on energy bills because it keeps the cold or hot air inside a building, so it takes less energy to regulate the building during extreme weather. The city hired an energy advocate in December, who focuses on telling the public about these energy programs.
AC: A ‘double-edged sword’
Air conditioning offers relief from hot weather, but it is becoming less environmentally sustainable.
Air conditioners remove hot air from a space and dump it outside, and they use electricity, which is usually from fossil fuels, to replace the heat with cool air. So while it solves heat-related problems temporarily, it worsens them long-term.
“It’s like this double-edged sword,” said David Fannon, a sustainable and high performance building expert and associate professor at Northeastern University.
Air conditioning can also strain electrical grids and increase carbon dioxide emissions.
Eversource, which supplies the majority of energy in New Bedford, wrote in an email the company is working to adapt its infrastructure to be resilient to extreme weather. The system performed well during last summer’s heat and had a few isolated outages but no significant issues, an Eversource representative wrote in an emailed statement.
For residents without air conditioning, and even those who do have it, the cost can be a barrier.
Fannon said as the climate changes and hotter days increase, air conditioning is necessary for health and safety, not just for comfort. Some people use fans or spray cool air on themselves, but these remedies are not very effective when temperatures climb above 90 degrees.
“I’ve talked to people who just have fans,” Paul said. “And they say it’s just like having a blow dryer on. It doesn’t cool you off; it just moves the air around.”
Sustainable solutions
Some architects and experts are looking at other ways to cool buildings.
Property owners should take a holistic approach to reducing outdoor heat, said Kathryn Duff, founder and director of studio2sustain — an architecture practice dedicated to creating sustainable infrastructure.
This includes using lighter colored materials that absorb rather than reflect heat, and creating low-maintentance landscape areas, like planting native plants, to absorb excess heat.
“We know we can’t manufacture space,” Duff said. “Urban spaces have a limited amount of space, but we have to look at creative ways of using [it].”
She suggests putting external shades on windows instead of internal shades to prevent heat from getting inside in the first place. There are also natural ways to cool a building, like putting a tray of water in front of a fan to feel cool and positioning buildings to receive certain wind patterns from the ocean. Some buildings in New Bedford are positioned to receive the “buzzard” — or the southwest wind that comes every afternoon, Duff said.
“Some of the buildings are oriented that way,” she said. “And [you can] certainly open up the windows and take advantage of that.”
Geothermal structures are another emerging option. These systems draw heat energy from below the earth’s surface and use pipes to move this energy to and from buildings in a “loop.” They have high upfront costs, but experts say expenses usually decrease in the long run because it takes less energy — and hence less money — to maintain a comfortable temperature.
One way to persuade people to pursue sustainable energy-saving options is to solve one problem primarily and then have sustainability be the secondary benefit, McGuire said.
“I don’t think that global change is the vision because it’s just so large, and it’s going to take so long,” Andrade said. “But every little change does help in some way.”
Crystal Yormick is a recent graduate of Boston University and a frequent contributor to The New Bedford Light. Email her at cyormick@newbedfordlight.org.