'Life or death': Baking U.S. cities legislate for air conditioning

(Reuters, 20 Aug 2020) Amid rising heat local officials are mandating that rental buildings have air conditioning.

Over the 15 years that she has lived in her seniors' apartment building in Maryland, Victoria Price has lost several neighbours to a worsening scourge: heat.

The building in Montgomery County, just outside Washington, was constructed in the 1960s and has seen deferred maintenance, she said.

"We've had electrical failures, heating outages, air conditioning failures," Price, 70, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "For a senior citizens' building to experience this can be tragic."

In 2015, some of the residents even picketed outside the building to warn about what she described as dangerous indoor conditions.

"Year after year, neighbours would end up being transported to the hospital for heat exhaustion," Price said, attributing the problem to both unseasonable warmth and faulty air conditioning.

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Reuters, 20 Aug 2020: 'Life or death': Baking U.S. cities legislate for air conditioning