202104120923 Climate Change and an Ageing Population
Imagine the direct warm heat when you stand next to a charcoal barbeque pit fire, or when they bring the white hot charcoal in a Korean barbeque restaurant. Now imagine that such heat is radiating from above and beside you, constantly in your home for HOURS, and you’re an elderly person…
My wife grew up in a HDB flat, which is on the top floor, and we go back every Sunday evening for dinner with her family.
In the past few weeks in March and April, two things have been happening at the same time:
- The weather has been very hot: this is the hot season, and it has been so hot and humid that frequently, I end up dripping with sweat after I finish my household chores or walk to the MRT station.
- They started removing the rooftop (including the heat insulation) of my wife’s childhood home (see pic).
The combined result of this has been an unbearably warm period for my in-laws. It is so warm and hot that we can feel the heat radiating from the (dark coloured) sofa and the walls, when we are there for our meals. My wife has written to the town council, which dutifully replied with a template answer that they are ‘hoisting’ the panels in mid April, and aim to complete the roof works by early May ‘weather permitting’.
According to my mother-in-law, the works are not just for one block, but for a few blocks at the same time. From the outside, it looks like all these blocks are in the same state as my in-laws’ place, i.e. their panels are removed and they are probably also getting the brunt of the heat. So it seems that they are concurrently working on multiple blocks, having removed their panels, and are aiming to concurrently finish multiple blocks’ roofworks by May.
From the project managers’ perspective, I am sure that what they are doing seems perfectly normal and ok. If anything, they are probably rushing to get the work done, despite the backlog from the Covid period which they have to deal with.
From the perspective of a resident of the top floor, though, such a plan is extremely unbearable. To get an idea of what it feels like, imagine the direct warm heat when you stand next to a charcoal barbeque pit fire, or when they bring the white hot charcoal in a Korean barbeque restaurant.
Now imagine that such heat is radiating from above and beside you, constantly in your home for HOURS: even when you have the fan blowing at you, you still feel the heat, and your body starts to sweat against the surface you’re sitting on. Even with air conditioning, the wall still feels warm. Now imagine that this heat isn’t just for the duration of a meal but for an entire working day.
Now, imagine if you are an elderly male or female person. Your ability to sweat and regulate your body temperature is much reduced: instead, your head just pounds, and you are constantly feeling giddy, despite drinking as much water as you can. Your urine is constantly dark, despite drinking water as much as you can. Your arthritis and asthma is acting up, and so you cannot bring yourself out of the house to escape the heat, because it is worse. (This was what happened to my mother-in-law)
Isn’t this just hell? Especially if you are a lower SES HDB resident who can’t afford air conditioning, or (like my mother-in-law) can’t sleep with air conditioning due to health reasons.
I am sure that the town council and the contractors are just doing their jobs, and nobody has any ill intentions whatsoever. As I said, they are probably doing their best to rush. However, the effect of the lack of awareness of the impact on the elderly residents also cannot be denied.
What, then, is a solution?
One possible way is what my mother-in-law (who was a construction welder in the 70s and 80s) suggested: they should work and complete the work one block at a time. That would reduce the discomfort and hell experienced by the residents of each block: instead of 4-5 blocks of residents experiencing hell for a month, you would have each block’s top floor resident experiencing hell for a week. We basically need to redesign engineering & construction workprocesses to accomodate minimizing discomfort for elderly citizens.
Zooming out, I suspect we will see even more of such situations and issues, because this small incident is symptomatic of two broader mega-trends for Singapore: climate change (which is causing greater and more prolonged heat spikes globally), and our ageing population. So I suspect this incident will probably repeat itself in some other form.