The Bronx, a steaming symbol of climate inequality in US

NEW YORK — As much of America baked in heat waves this week, the relatively poor New York borough of the Bronx suffered disproportionately.

Reinaldo Morales, a 68-year-old military veteran, went to a seniors’ community centre with air conditioning because turning it on at home is too costly.

“We live in a cement jungle,” he said.

“It’s nice that they have a cooling center like this. But the idea that we can’t even afford to cool our home is outrageous,” said Morales.

Temperatures soared as high as 35ºC this week in New York, far from the 48ºC that roasted Las Vegas.

But one image here stuck out: a swing bridge linking the Bronx and Manhattan got stuck in the half-open position for hours on Monday as the heat expanded the metal in its hydraulics. Boats pumped water to cool it off.

The Bronx endures problems with poverty, healthcare and air pollution, and some of its neighbourhoods suffered more than others in the heat because of a lack of trees to cool things off.

“We have limited shading so it does get very hot especially when the sun is at its peak,” said Sandra Arroyo, programme director of Casa Boricua, the seniors’ centre where Morales went to cool off.

Many residents of the Bronx are low-earning Latinos or African Americans, who say the heat-absorbing buildings that line street after street make life — and even breathing — difficult in the scorching, muggy New York summer.

“You walk a block and you are suffocating,” said Juan Lorenzo, a 72-year-old Dominican.

“You just get really tired,” added Stephanie Rodriguez, a 21-year-old cashier watching her two-year-old son play in water spouts at the only large park in all of the borough.

“We need more green spaces,” said Arif Ullah, head of a community organisation called South Bronx Unite.

All along one bank of the Harlem River in the Bronx stand waste treatment facilities, a power plant and warehouses — all sources of industry and thus, more heat.

Nearby sits a small shadeless kids park, under a series of highway overpasses.

Ullah said racist urban policies have allowed communities like his to become urban heat islands that lead to health problems.

“And really, it’s a matter of life or death,” he said.

Neighbourhoods like Hunts Point and Mott Haven in the south of the Bronx have above-average rates of emergency room visits for respiratory problems attributable to pollution, according to a report issued in April by the New York city government, its first to address the issue of what is known as environmental justice.

The city says around 350 people in New York die each year because of the heat or health problems made worse by it, and Black residents are hit twice as often as their white counterparts.

The city says aggravating factors include a lack of air conditioning at home, a situation more common in the Bronx than New York’s other boroughs.

Deadly heat waves in major cities in America and elsewhere have become more common because of climate change and things will only get worse, experts say.