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As the Inland Empire braces for an extreme heat warning this week, a community group is helping residents in the hottest parts of the desert manage scorching weather.
The nonprofit Comité Civico del Valle has distributed air purifiers, air conditioning devices and water purifiers to families living around the Salton Sea, through a weather resilience program that GoFundMe.org launched.
“This program’s about fairness, safety and dignity for our residents,” Luis Olmedo, executive director of Comité Civico del Valle said at a press conference last week. “It’s not just about handing out equipment. It’s about making sure that vulnerable residents, especially seniors, people with health conditions and low-income families are not left behind when extreme heat strikes.”
The National Weather Service is warning of extreme weather conditions in inland desert areas this week, with temperatures forecast at 106 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Weather conditions, it stated, will be “dangerously hot” and pose a “major heat risk” of illnesses including heat cramps, heat exhaustion and heat stroke.
But triple digit temperatures are the norm in summer for desert communities in eastern Riverside and Imperial County.
And aging homes aren’t equipped to protect against those conditions. Many families live in mobile homes, including old, aluminum trailers without insulation that are “like being inside a can,” said Esther Bejarano, director of health programs for the organization.
“Imagine living inside that trailer where it’s 30, 40 years old, and you have a non-working inside window unit… to cool the house,” she said.
In 2022 Imperial County had more than 100 heat-related emergency room visits per 100,000 residents: the highest rate in the state. Last year the county recorded 196 heat-related medical incidents, including 11 deaths. This year so far it has reported 65 illnesses and no deaths.
Neighboring Riverside County, which also includes parts of the Salton Sea, recorded 1,627 emergency room visits and 65 deaths due to heat-related illness in 2024 and 550 heat-related emergency department visits and two deaths this year.
GoFundMe.org introduced a pilot program to reduce those risks. It provided half a million dollars to Comité Civico del Valle to provide the devices to people who lacked air filtration or cooling systems, or couldn’t afford to use them.
“I knew people who lived in manufactured homes, which they called trailers. They had to go to the Circle K, the Arco, or the public library, to get cooled off, because they didn’t have air conditioning,” said Rodrigo Palma, a 72-year-old Brawley resident, who received help through the program.
The goal was to provide 100 families with updated cooling systems. So far the program has installed 72 cooling systems, 389 air purifiers and four reverse osmosis water filters, said Amanda Brown Lehrman, executive director of GoFundMe.org.
“While these interventions do not replace the need for systemic change, they do provide families with tools to protect their health and manage the everyday challenges a little bit more faithfully and a little bit more affordably,” Lehrman said.
The weather resilience program hit some snags, Bejarano said. The cooling systems, called mini-split air conditioning units, are ductless systems designed to cool individual rooms quickly and efficiently, she said.
“They’ve been very popular and sales have skyrocketed, because people cannot afford to turn on the AC if they do have one to cool the entire house,” she said.
But contractors hired to install them found that permits cost as much as $900 per unit, she said.
“We’ve had a lot of hurdles with the very high cost of permits for these homes and families that need it the most,” she said. “That’s something we need to do some policy work on.”
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
