Enduring the Killer Heat, in Their Own Words

The cost of the 2021 western North America heat wave and the fires it kindled was measured in records broken, lives lost and homes destroyed. Behind those numbers were millions of ordinary people forced to confront extraordinary times, as our world has become warmer.

Five years later, The Tyee is presenting the stories of five of those people, as told in their own words. We start with the ordeal of Jen Hatton in Delta. Over the next 10 days you will hear as well from:

A Vancouver homeowner who had to find a new home when her condo turned into a greenhouse.

A Lower Mainland firefighter who answered emergency calls as extreme heat buckled the province’s health-care system.

A retired school principal who was forced to evacuate when that heat turned to flame in Lytton.

And a Kamloops councillor who could do little but watch as fire scorched one of the city’s outer neighbourhoods.

Their testimonies were created with the Climate Disaster Project at the University of Victoria.

Some of what they share can be difficult to read. But the survivors want you to know what happened to them for a reason. So we can be closer together. So we can feel less alone. So you know what to do when one of the worst days of your life happens, without warning.

That’s why these stories aren’t just an account of the harm caused by an environment we have harmed and are still harming. They are early warning systems and emergency preparedness plans. Because the survivors of past climate disasters carry with them knowledge and wisdom needed to help us confront the extreme events that have now become seasonal. Reading their testimonies now isn’t just about memorialization. It’s about preparation. An opportunity to change what will happen today and tomorrow. — Sean Holman of the Climate Disaster Project

‘I Was So Glad He Picked Me’

Jen Hatton was born in British Columbia’s Interior and raised in Surrey by her mom. There, she found a love of the outdoors and played band in high school, before studying history at Simon Fraser University and meeting her husband Greg. After he bought her a book on their first date, she knew he was a keeper. They married in 2012 and seven years later moved to Delta. In 2021, B.C.’s extreme heat wave arrived five months after the birth of her youngest son, Leif, brother to three-year-old Eleanor and five-year-old Daniel.

This is Jen’s story as told to Bennett Gilleland.

In the news, there was this weird high-pressure system. They were forecasting 40 C. I've never seen heat like that here. I was born in the Interior, so I've seen 40 C in the summer easily, but not the coast. CBC kept reiterating, "This is not going to blow away, this is actually going to happen." When your life as an animal changes, it throws you. There's no plan of attack. It's coming. This is real.

We didn't have a lot of options, so we stayed put. We didn't know how long it was going to be. One day? Two? Is it going to be three? God forbid they've gotten it wrong. We have food, water, electricity, fans and all that stuff. How long can we hold out? How long can we last like this before we go nuts?

It was unlike anything we'd ever experienced. Any time you went outside, it just smelled hot. The resin coming out of the trees, the parched grass and baked dirt. Sun-baked trees, hot dust from where the dirt's all dried out, and you can almost smell that the plants are struggling.

You hear the odd car drive by, but not the nature. The birds, they’re not out. Not even the bugs are out, it's so hot. Frogs are not singing. Even at night. Nobody was mowing the lawn. Nobody was outside gardening. I live in a neighbourhood full of families; to have it just be silent, it's unnatural.

I had concerns that Leif was too hot. Babies are not great at regulating their body temperature. Babies do a much better job when they're skin to skin with you. I just hung out with no shirt on, a baby plastered to me, latched for hours at a time. He would fall asleep and unlatch, and I would get a cloth or a blanket between us to soak up some of the sweat and then lay him back down. I resigned myself for as long as it took, and carefully monitored his wet diapers to make sure that he was hydrated.

We didn't know how much sleep we were going to get. The baby would be waking up in the night if he got dehydrated. He would wake up wanting to feed. When the kids are up, so are you. Even if you'd like to crawl into bed, curl up, spread out and evaporate, you can't; you've got to put the time in. Hour by hour, trying to keep the kids from exploding.

That didn't leave me a lot of space to keep an eye on Fergus. He was my boy. I had him since I was a freshly minted, young biology student. I peered through the SPCA cat room window, and I noticed this little orange guy. He was meowing at me. I walked over to say hello. He put his paws through the bars, grabbed my leg and started purring. I dissolved into tears. He picked me. "This is the one."

His name was Pumpkin, which is an insult to scary man cats everywhere. I put my foot down and named him Fergus. He and I were on the same wavelength. He always knew when I was suffering or scared or sad, and he would come find me, make sure I was OK. When I didn't know what to do next, I would cuddle him and gather the strength to do the next thing. He was there to see me through life. He was my best bud.

At that point, he had had early-stage kidney disease for over two years, which is common for older cats. That’s usually not what will finish a cat off if it’s well managed. When it's that hot, it takes a toll on the system. One of the few times that I put Leif down was to get up, stretch my limbs and see how he was doing. He was 18, overheated and confused. The other cats were younger, generally adaptable to heat, melted cat style, but he really struggled.

I asked Greg, “Can you bring Fergus into the cold room? I'm really worried about him.”

Greg did, but Fergus just wanted to leave. He was by the door waiting to be let out. He just wanted to hide in the bathroom the whole time. There were no cabinets he could climb into, but it was quiet. He had the bath mat, so he loafed himself and hunkered down. He was curled up, hunched into himself. He wouldn’t drink. You want to help them, but they can't tell you what's wrong.

He took a turn for the worse, so I called the emergency vet. I didn’t want to alarm my kids. My husband was doing his best, but he couldn’t come with me. I had to drag Fergus to Vancouver, which was fun for exactly nobody. He wasn't happy in the car, so he was yelling away. Going to those vet clinics can be quite challenging. They say 24-7, but if they don’t have the capacity to see you, they’re not going to see you. I felt like we'd just gone through the unknown; now I was driving into the unknown. What's going on with my buddy?

The next day, they called and diagnosed him with pancreatitis. His system wasn't able to deal with the kidney disease. It can be hard if they get dehydrated. We tried the medication and special food, but he kept declining. It wasn't working. We knew he wasn’t going to get better. The heat dome finished him off.

Because of the pandemic, the vet was not allowing people to be present to have him euthanized. I didn't want to hand him over to the vet and have his last moments be scared and alone. A mobile euthanasia clinic came to our house. Fergus came to say hi at the door. He always wanted to see who was coming.

We had a chance to love on him. Let him have all the foods he's not supposed to have, like chocolate milk, Clamato, Fancy Feast, which is super gross (he enjoyed it). I took a voice memo of him purring. We cuddled a lot. The other cats could smell him before he left.

Then we signed the paperwork. I was able to have him in my lap in the backyard. He had unwillingly transitioned into an indoor cat. Seeing him sniff the breeze one last time was nice. The vet administered the barbiturate overdose. He sighed, and I knew that he had left. I held him and told him what a good cat he was, how I was so glad he picked me.

He was a really good boy.

I took him for cremation. When I die, I want to be cremated, and all of my pets can go to rest with me. I have an altar set up with all my pets, their paw prints, their collars, their pictures. It was good to be able to give them closure as well. I got a mug with his paws on it, so I can still have coffee with Fergus, as weirdly cat lady as that seems. My veterinarian sent a floral arrangement and a condolence card. I still see her all the time, and she still asks about the cats. They didn't have to do that. They did anyway.

Once the heat dome gave over, it was such a relief to return to regular weather. It was nice to tell my older kids, “We're going to go outside now. We're going to pick flowers and catch bugs and do things in nature that we love to do.” We teach them to love nature and respect wild places. We teach them that being kind might mean picking up garbage. The Beaver Scout promise is "to be kind and help take care of the earth." But our governments have the science that shows climate change is happening and they do nothing. What are we teaching about being a good human being when this is just allowed to happen?

It was enraging to have to shepherd myself and my family through the heat dome, worry about my baby’s health, worry about my mother-in-law and father-in-law, who are quite a bit older, lose my cat, to say nothing of those folk who did lose family members. What kind of world are we leaving my children, their friends and their children? All these aspects of life are tied to this catastrophe and we are going to see it in real time. That’s been its own mourning. The sort of thing that I would console myself with by cuddling Fergus.

This testimony was co-created by the Climate Disaster Project, a newsroom co-ordinated at the University of Victoria that works with climate-impacted communities to document and investigate their stories. Subscribe to the project’s newsletter here.