As temperatures climbed in Portland on Friday, Shane and Rania Kaptur walked with their chihuahua mix Marley outside the Northwest Tower, a 13-story public housing complex in Northwest Portland.

During the 2021 heat dome, two people died at the tower, which is owned and operated by Home Forward, but the Kapturs, who live together at the tower, said they felt prepared for the heat that’s expected to top 100 degrees over the weekend.

Over the past two years, the housing provider has offered air conditioners to residents, via the Portland Clean Energy Fund. The Kapturs received a unit two years ago. This week, they said, the tower’s managers hung up fliers in hallways and elevators warning residents about the heat wave and inviting them to cool off in a community room with a large portable air conditioner. They also posted notes on residents’ doors reminding them to drink fluids, and they distributed temperature gauges to residents to help them understand when the temperatures start to reach dangerous levels.

“They’re trying to make us aware of what’s going on. They have put in the effort,” Rania Kaptur said.

The building managers’ heat response at Northwest Tower is one of the many large and small changes across the metro area as housing providers and public-health officials implement lessons learned from previous heat waves to better protect the city’s most vulnerable residents.

In the aftermath of the heat dome three years ago, county public-health officials embarked on a process to understand who was most vulnerable to heat. Sixty-nine people died during that extreme heat in 2021, and they were predominantly 65 or older, lived alone and lacked air conditioning. They were mostly residents of multi-family housing, including public housing, owners of manufactured homes, as well as homeless individuals.

Research has also shown that temperatures vary by neighborhood or even by city block, depending on the types of buildings, amount of pavement and tree canopy cover.

Earlier this year, the county released the results of last year’s tri-county mapping project. One stark finding: Across the three-county area, there was a 17-degree difference between the hottest and coolest places on the afternoon of July 22, 2023, the day that volunteers collected readings.

The temperature data is included in Multnomah County’s Heat Vulnerability Index, an interactive tool that displays how heat vulnerability, sensitivity and exposure affect people’s ability to adapt to extreme heat by census tract or specific address. The county and its partners have used that index to better target outreach efforts during heat waves. This week, county officials used it as one factor in deciding where to open cooling shelters. Three opened on Friday as temperatures soared and another is set to open this weekend.

Earlier this week, the county also deployed outreach workers to alert people who are living on the streets about the rising temperatures. And a small team of county workers has put in calls to more than 1,000 people who are part of the county’s senior, veteran and disability programs to make sure they know whom to contact in case they feel overheated and how to coordinate a ride to a cooling shelter.

“We just want people to call and ask for help. We don’t want them to wait. We want to make sure that we have the opportunity to support them in getting somewhere safe,” said Rachel Pearl, deputy director of County Human Services.

The county also has vastly improved its emergency shelter response, said Chris Voss, director of emergency management.

In the past, the county had just a few locations to count on and bought supplies a few days ahead of the severe weather event. Now the county has forged dozens of agreements with partners across the county, from churches to nonprofits, to provide shelters during high heat days. It has trained hundreds of people, mostly county employees, to staff the cooling centers, he said. And it has stashed a vast amount of supplies – from cleaning items to garbage cans to wheelchairs and medical devices – that can be used to run shelters more efficiently. It has a dedicated warehouse for those supplies.

“The sheer number of facilities we have that we can access and use has significantly improved and expanded since 2021,” he said. “And it’s not just cots and blankets anymore.”

Voss said more improvements are likely to come in future years as summers get hotter and more people seek shelter.

“We’ve done a lot to improve this program over the last three years, but we’re living with climate change, which means that we’re not done with the changes,” said Voss.

Another key response has focused on giving air-conditioning units to vulnerable Portlanders. The city’s heat-response program, Cooling Portland, was launched after the heat dome and has installed 9,239 heat pumps and air conditioners in homes and apartments of people who are most at risk. The program, which began in 2022, is on track to distribute 15,000 units by 2026.

More than 400 Oregonians also received air conditioners through the Oregon Health Plan between March 1 and May 31. It’s a first-in-the nation approach, approved by federal authorities, to use Medicaid funds for items that can mitigate heat but aren’t traditionally thought of as medical devices. The Oregon Health Plan, the state’s version of Medicaid, covers lower income Oregonians.

But in a city where summers were once mild and air conditioners sparse, the demand for cooling has increased exponentially. In mid-June, when Cooling Portland simplified its application process, allowing people to call 311 to request a unit, the program received more than 1,000 calls in a single day requesting a cooling unit. Since then, it has installed more than 800 additional units and is processing several thousand more applications.

Still, officials and researchers have warned that air conditioning is not a panacea, especially when it comes to public housing. A study at three Home Forward locations last year showed that air conditioners don’t significantly decrease indoor temperatures. Researchers found that people sometimes didn’t use them out of concerns for cost and due to the noise they made, and the units could only handle a limited level of cooling.

The study also found that public housing – especially concrete-and-steel high-rise properties – hold heat much longer and don’t cool off at night.

That’s why the Kapturs at their Northwest Tower one-bedroom apartment have developed additional cooling routines. In the mornings, they open all the windows to let fresh air in, then shutter them and pull down the blinds when it starts to get warm. They keep the air conditioning on all day, even if they leave the house.

“We’re encased in concrete. And once that concrete gets hot, then it’s hot and it doesn’t cool down,” Rania Kaptur said. “If you don’t take care of things in the morning, it gets hot in there and you’re messed up for the rest of the night.”

— Gosia Wozniacka covers environmental justice, climate change, the clean energy transition and other environmental issues. Reach her at gwozniacka@oregonian.com or 971-421-3154.