KJZZ: This will be a record year for heat-related deaths, in spite of spending to prevent it

Jay Duval has been homeless since November. He has a tent, but he says most nights in downtown Phoenix this summer, it was too sweltering to sleep in it.

“When you got no breeze or anything, you can’t; it’s way too hot,” Duval said.

Instead, he spent this summer’s record hot nights sleeping in the open. He’s 52, diabetic, and he knows the relentless heat of the past few months has been bad for his health. A few times, he felt so weak he was hardly able to move all day, he said. But he saw others who had it worse.

“A friend of mine came up to my tent one day and wasn’t really coherent, couldn’t really talk, and he fell over,” Duval said. “I called the ambulance for him and they came and took him in and he had a 106 temperature.”

Duval doesn’t know what happened after that. He fears the worst. That was in July, and he never saw his friend again after paramedics took the man away.

Duval is among nearly 500 unsheltered people living in the downtown homeless encampment known as “The Zone.” There were more heat-related deaths in this ZIP code than any other in Maricopa County last year.