Cooking in Arizona: Why your heat death might not count
Officials seem to have a really creative way of ignoring when the thermometer actually kills someone.
When Adam Willson died in his own sweltering house, the official paperwork basically shrugged. It turns out that tracking heat-related deaths in Arizona is more of an art project than a science.
The system is set up to ignore anything that isn't a direct, immediate medical emergency recorded in a specific way. If you have an underlying condition or just happened to be indoors, it’s rarely counted as a heat casualty. It’s a convenient blind spot that keeps the numbers looking much lower than the reality on the ground.
Bureaucracy is apparently great at cooling things down, at least on paper.
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