Walt Humphries: It’s summer, and you may feel like a Thanksgiving turkey roasting in the oven

There is nothing like a heat wave to make reporters turn all slurpy and discombobulated.

Walt Humphries: It’s summer, and you may feel like a Thanksgiving turkey roasting in the oven Published 3:10 am Monday, July 13, 2026 There is nothing like a heat wave to make reporters turn all slurpy and discombobulated. They do try to pass on some information but often end up just burbling old cliches.

Not sure why but they have stopped showing footage of someone frying eggs on the sidewalk or on the hood of a car. At least that was a little comical, but maybe some people objected to it being cruel to eggs. Maybe they could show a vegan stir-frying some vegetables instead.

Reporters often like to handle easy stuff — slogans like “stay hydrated,” or “don’t get dehydrated,” or “drink water, but don’t drink too much because we don’t want people to get super hydrated or water intoxicated.” Water intoxication, or hyponatremia, is a real thing. A person drinks too much water too quickly and this causes body and brains cells to swell and lowers the sodium levels in your blood.

It starts out with a throbbing headache, nausea, vomiting, confusion, muscle weakness and fatigue. It can lead to disorientation, seizures, coma and even death. So, sip, don’t guzzle, all things in moderation.

One subject reporters and politicians don’t like to talk about are deaths during a heat wave. I was shocked when I looked it up, but well over 600 people a year in Canada die from the heat. Many are elderly, sick or disabled, and I suspect the numbers are under-reported.

So why aren’t these numbers taken more seriously and why aren’t measures taken to reduce them? Most deaths occur in dwellings, so the dwellings need some fixing. They are getting too hot and that is a design and engineering problem.

Our buildings and cities are built with too much glass, steel, concrete and asphalt. In short, they get too hot, and ways to cool them down aren’t in the building code. They should be.

If you are too hot, here are a few bush tips: -Take a paper towel or a piece of cloth like a bandana with you. Wet it down and put it around your neck or on your head.

As the water evaporates, it will cool you down. Working in the bush, I have even wet my shirt down. It’s a good trick to know, it’s cheap and it works well.

-If there is a pond, lake or stream nearby, take your boots off and stick your feet in the water. The water is usually cooler than the air, and if there is enough water, you can always go swimming. Even at home, you can fill a pan or basin and soak your feet.

So, there are ways to cool off that do work. Cooling a room or a building is more difficult, but some cities use water running through pipes to cool down. I believe Toronto does this for some buildings.

Here is a bit of trivia: many cities down south use more energy to cool down in summer than they do to heat them in winter. With today’s knowledge and technology, we should be able to make our cities and dwellings much more comfortable and safer. We should be able to check out which buildings are vulnerable and install thermostats that can warn that the buildings are getting too hot.

Trying to sleep in a building that is too hot is not pleasant. Maybe we should pass a law that everyone is entitled to a good night’s sleep. In one camp during a heat wave, it was too hot to sleep.

I remember one fellow commented that he felt like a Thanksgiving turkey roasting in the oven. Another time, after a very long hot traverse through the bush, when we got back to the lake we just waded into the water to cool off — just like kids having a water fight. Dealing with the heat and the cold is all a part of surviving on the planet.

So do what you can to be comfortable. Have a great summer.