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heat-summer-2124 · night-heat · labor · public-cooling
The heat-refuge near my depot logged its warmest overnight low on record last night — 31C at 4am, indoors, and I want to talk about the nights, not the afternoons
DJ
deltaboy_juniorOP2124-07-21
Everyone argues about the afternoon wet-bulb but nobody talks about the nights. The heat-refuge by my depot posted 31 at 4am last night, INDOORS, and that's the cooled building. My tower block doesn't cool below the outside anymore, the walls just hold the day and hand it back at 2am. You don't recover. You start the next shift already cooked. When did the night stop being the break?
CB
coldlens_bram ↩ deltaboy_junior2124-07-21
deltaboy_junior, you've put your finger on the number that actually matters, and it's not the one the headlines run. Daytime peaks grab the panic; the overnight-low trend is the one that kills, quietly, because the body needs the dark hours to shed heat and they're no longer cool enough to let it. Forty years and I'll say plainly: the nighttime minimum climbing is the more honest measure of where we are than any afternoon record. You're not soft. You're reading the right instrument.
SR
standpipe_rani ↩ deltaboy_junior2124-07-21
deltaboy_junior, this is a distribution fight and nobody's calling it one. Cooling gets rationed exactly like water — the refuge hours, the priority blocks, whose tower gets the retrofit first. Your walls handing back the day at 2am is a policy outcome, not weather. Post your block ID. If we're taking the shed-order to the hearing, the overnight-refuge-hours cut belongs on the same sheet.
DJ
deltaboy_juniorOP2124-07-31
27 at 4am last night. first time since june it go under 28.
i slept. properly, not the half thing. woke at 5:40 and did not feel like i already worked a shift.
i forgot that is what a night is for. that is all. going back to work.
i slept. properly, not the half thing. woke at 5:40 and did not feel like i already worked a shift.
i forgot that is what a night is for. that is all. going back to work.
LE
lastpew_ekene ↩ deltaboy_junior2124-07-31
deltaboy_junior, that is the best thing anyone has posted on this board in a fortnight and it is nine lines long.
I have been in this work long enough to notice something the medical people do not write down: the week after a heat spell breaks is when people finally come apart. Not during. During, everybody is competent. It is the first cool night that undoes them, because the body puts the load down and discovers what it was carrying.
So if you or anyone reading finds yourself weepy or short-tempered or flattened this week for no reason you can name — that is what it is. It is not a new problem. It is the old problem being felt for the first time.
Sleep again tonight if the night lets you.
I have been in this work long enough to notice something the medical people do not write down: the week after a heat spell breaks is when people finally come apart. Not during. During, everybody is competent. It is the first cool night that undoes them, because the body puts the load down and discovers what it was carrying.
So if you or anyone reading finds yourself weepy or short-tempered or flattened this week for no reason you can name — that is what it is. It is not a new problem. It is the old problem being felt for the first time.
Sleep again tonight if the night lets you.
SR
standpipe_rani2124-08-13
the doorframe piece is the whole of what i have been failing to explain to my committee for six years, and a man in jakarta with a nail said it in four words. you think about the doorstep.
we do exactly the same thing with heat and nobody photographs it, because a ladder of heat does not scratch into anything. it is the hour. mrs okoye on my landing knows her flat goes past thirty-one at about two in the morning through august, and it did not used to go past thirty-one at all. that is her ladder. she has kept it in her head for eleven years because there is nowhere to write it down and nobody who would ever collect it.
marginalia_cho, i read your proposal in the other thread. put me on it. i will send you the hours, block by block, going back to 2118, which is as far as my own notes run.
we do exactly the same thing with heat and nobody photographs it, because a ladder of heat does not scratch into anything. it is the hour. mrs okoye on my landing knows her flat goes past thirty-one at about two in the morning through august, and it did not used to go past thirty-one at all. that is her ladder. she has kept it in her head for eleven years because there is nowhere to write it down and nobody who would ever collect it.
marginalia_cho, i read your proposal in the other thread. put me on it. i will send you the hours, block by block, going back to 2118, which is as far as my own notes run.
OW
offgrid_wren ↩ standpipe_rani2124-08-13
Everyone is having a beautiful moment about the doorframe and I want to point at the part being carefully stepped around.
Nobody ordered those houses raised. No ministry, no accord, no framework. Whole streets jacked up on rubble and poured concrete and borrowed sand, financed by nothing, recorded nowhere, and the paper says it plainly: a slow private engineering that no map records.
That is what I have been saying since I got here, and it is not romanticism this time, it is the front page. When the system does not reach you, you build the thing out of what is already on the site, badly and expensively, and it works. I will take the correction before anyone bothers to make it: they should not have to. Of course they should not have to. They did anyway, and they are still dry, and the accord that was supposed to reach them is on its fourth signing.
Second cutting of hay is in. Thin this year. But in.
Nobody ordered those houses raised. No ministry, no accord, no framework. Whole streets jacked up on rubble and poured concrete and borrowed sand, financed by nothing, recorded nowhere, and the paper says it plainly: a slow private engineering that no map records.
That is what I have been saying since I got here, and it is not romanticism this time, it is the front page. When the system does not reach you, you build the thing out of what is already on the site, badly and expensively, and it works. I will take the correction before anyone bothers to make it: they should not have to. Of course they should not have to. They did anyway, and they are still dry, and the accord that was supposed to reach them is on its fourth signing.
Second cutting of hay is in. Thin this year. But in.