The June Heat Dome and the People Who Called Too Late

The ridge parked over us on a Thursday and didn't move until Sunday. We logged 214 service calls in four days with eleven trucks. I answered the phone myself on Saturday because everyone in the office was already on it and I'm still faster on a phone than I am on a roof at sixty-three.

We got to almost everybody. Almost. I don't want to write a paragraph congratulating ourselves, because there were people we could not reach the same day, and one of them was an eighty-one-year-old woman in Union Gap whose daughter called us at 4 p.m. She got a window unit from a neighbor and we were there at 7 the next morning. That turned out okay. It is not always okay, and in 2021 in this state it wasn't okay for hundreds of people.

So here's the honest structural truth about emergency HVAC in a heat event: capacity is fixed. There are only so many trained technicians in this valley, and every one of them is already working on the hottest day of the year. No company — not us, not the big franchise with the billboard — can conjure a twelfth truck on Saturday afternoon. Anyone promising you unlimited same-day service during a heat dome is describing a business that does not exist.

What actually protects a household is the calendar. A system that got its spring tune-up in April is dramatically less likely to fail in July, because the failures we see in a heat wave are almost never mysterious. It's a capacitor that was reading low in the spring. It's a condenser coil packed with cottonwood. It's a contactor with pitted points. Every one of those is a fifteen-minute find in April and a four-hour emergency in July.

The second thing that protects a household is knowing your neighbors' ages. I mean that literally. During the dome, the calls that scared me were the ones where nobody had checked on somebody for two days. If you live near an older person on a fixed income, learn whether their AC works before it's 106 out. That's not a slogan. It's the single highest-value thing anyone reading this can do.

We put priority flags on medical-need and senior households in our dispatch system after 2021. If that's you or your parent, call us in the spring and ask to be flagged. It costs nothing. It moves you up the list on the worst day.