Tomorrow: Elizabeth Weil

Killing Season Deaths from extreme heat are just beginning.

- Laura Thompson

EARLY IN JULY, a smothering heat wave settled in over the western U.S.—124 degrees Fahrenheit in Palm Springs; 120 in Las Vegas; 119 in Redding, in far northern California. Dan Berc, a National Weather Service meteorologist, described the situation as “not normal … We’re talking ten to 12 degrees above normal for the hottest part of the year.” That first week of July, a thousand fish died in Lake Elizabeth, in Fremont, California— asphyxiation; the hotter the water, the less oxygen it holds. Still, in western Arizona, in the foothills of the Mohave Mountains, Alyssa Wroblewski assumed July 5 would be, as she later put it, “a regular, happy day” for her family. She and her husband, Matthew, a detective in the Riverside Police Department, would take their toddler and infant daughters out on a boat on Lake Havasu, a Colorado River reservoir.

The Wroblewskis did this all the time, strapping life preservers on their young kids. They boated in April, just weeks after Tanna Rae was born. They boated in May and June. That Fourth of July weekend, Alyssa and Matthew dressed their daughters in matching red, white, and blue swimsuits. Tanna’s diaper poked out between the suit’s leg band and her fat-rolled thigh.

Children’s bodies cool themselves less efficiently than adults’, and babies’ bodies cool even less efficiently than that. By afternoon, on the lake, the air temperature had climbed to 120. Around 5 p.m., Alyssa and Matthew realized Tanna wasn’t breathing. The parents performed CPR until the fire department arrived. Four-month-old Tanna was airlifted to Phoenix Children’s Hospital. But it was too late.