More air conditioning means fewer deaths

About 91 percent, or 36 million, of Southern households now have central air conditioning units, a number that has grown considerably since the late 1970s, when about a quarter of Southerners didn’t have air conditioners, according to the U.S. Census figures from 2005.

Another 5.7 million have window-mounted units.

The most recent statistics from the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public utility providing power to seven states, show only 2.5 percent of its customers don’t have air conditioning.

While air conditioning has always been more widespread in the South, Dr. Robert Hutton, chief of emergency medicine at Baptist Hospital in Nashville, said decreasing prices for units and better education on heat-related illnesses have helped reduce heat casualties.

‘People have better access to air conditioners now,’ Hutton said. ‘The cost of air conditioners has come down significantly so that even our poorest houses, or at least people in extended families, have air conditioners.’

More than a dozen people died in a heat wave that swept the South last year, but that doesn’t compare with heat waves as late as 1980, when more than 1,200 people died.

‘Air conditioners have gotten a lot more efficient, they’re a lot quieter, and they got to a point where a lot more people could get them,’ Hutton said.

Heat in 2003 killed 15,000 people in France, where air conditioning is far less common, and killed another 112 last year.

Since the extreme heat began last Friday, at least 35 people have gone to Memphis emergency rooms for heat-related illnesses, Memphis and Shelby County Health Department spokeswoman Joan Carr said.

Hospitals have treated 14 people in Nashville.