


on June 27 - at that time all building doors will be locked and card access will be denied to anyone trying to enter exterior building doors. A historic number of medical and fire calls challenged first responders and overwhelmed local emergency departments.The Marquette University Police Department and IT Services on Tuesday, June 27, will test the university’s campus security management system, cCure, which allows MUPD to remotely and simultaneously lock all building access and interior door and elevator card readers in the event of an active shooter or other emergency situation. City leaders later said they did not have a sufficient plan to help older residents. The city was not ready for heat: Just two of its community centers had air conditioning, and only 20% of its drinking fountains - turned off during Covid - were operational on the first day of extreme temperatures. Seattle did not have a specific plan for heat waves in June 2021, when temperatures soared to 108, 5 degrees hotter than its previous record, in an event scientists later said would have been “virtually impossible” without the influence of climate change. Unexpected climate impacts have stung unprepared cities. The agency said that it was hosting multiple interagency calls every day to address the hazard, that it had sent notices about smoke through Notify NYC, its emergency notification system, and that other city agencies had distributed high-quality masks. In a statement to NBC News, NYC Emergency Management said its existing emergency plans are “scalable and flexible” to a variety of hazards, including the recent air quality emergency. So that’s something that we are now developing,” he said. “The other types of weather events where we have an off-the-shelf plan, that leads to certain specific actions. The smoke is a reminder that it is difficult, if not impossible, to isolate from the threats associated with climate change. Wildfire smoke experts said that it would have been difficult to foresee such dramatic impacts to cities like New York but that climate change is also reshaping natural hazards at a startling pace and leaders throughout the country need to prepare better for impacts. A jogger trots under haze over the Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.

Kass, who is now senior vice president for environmental, climate and urban health at Vital Strategies, a nonprofit global public health organization, said that efforts were made to create detailed maps of communities and populations that are particularly vulnerable to climate emergencies but that the reports did not typically include wildfires and their associated air pollution. “Wildfires were not really a scenario, in all honesty, that I recall us specifically contemplating,” said Daniel Kass, who was New York City’s deputy commissioner for environmental health from 2009 to 2016. People take photos of the sun as smoke from the wildfires in Canada cause hazy conditions in New York City on June 7, 2023. Even for a city that has spent years planning to deal with climate change, smoke has not been a major concern.
