surpriseThe first heat wave of the season is already underway with triple-digit temperatures across the Southwest. Fire Fighting Phoenix – America’s hottest big city – adopts new strategy in hopes of saving more lives in county where 645 deaths occurred heat-related deaths Last year.

From the start of this season, Phoenix Fire Department Heatstroke victims are being immersed in ice while being transported to area hospitals. This medical technique, called immersion in cold water, is familiar to marathon runners and military service members and has recently been adopted as a protocol by hospitals in Phoenix, said fire Capt. John Prato.

Prieto demonstrated the method earlier this week outside Valleywise Health Medical Center’s emergency department in Phoenix, packing ice cubes inside an impermeable blue bag around a medical dummy representing a patient. He said the technique can dramatically lower body temperatures in minutes.

“Just last week we had a critical patient that we were able to bring back to life before they were even through the emergency room doors,” Prieto said. “That’s our goal — to improve patient survival.”

Heatstroke Treatment Ice and human-sized immersion bags have been made standard equipment on all Phoenix Fire Department emergency vehicles. It’s one of a number of measures the city has adopted this year as temperatures and the resulting deaths continue to rise. Phoenix is keeping two cooling stations open overnight for the first time this season.

Emergency responders across much of the region stretching from southeastern California to central Arizona are preparing for weather that the National Weather Service said will be the “warmest” since last September.

Excessive heat warnings have been issued for parts of southern Nevada and Arizona from Wednesday morning through Friday evening, with highs expected to top 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius) in Las Vegas and Phoenix. The unseasonably hot weather is expected to spread northward and reach parts of the Pacific Northwest by the weekend.

Maricopa County officials were stunned earlier this year when final tallies showed Arizona’s largest county had recorded 645 heat-related deaths, most of them in Phoenix. The most brutal period was a heat wave that saw 31 consecutive days of temperatures at or above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.4 Celsius), killing more than 400 people.

“Over the last three years we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of cases of severe heat-related illness,” said Dr. Paul Pugsley, emergency medical director at Valleywise Health. About 40% of these people don’t survive.

Cooling patients before they reach the emergency department could change the equation, he said.

Pugsley said the technique is “not very widely practiced in non-military hospitals in the U.S., nor in the pre-hospital setting among fire departments or first responders.” He said one reason for this may be the long-held belief that it was impractical or impossible for first responders or even hospitals to use the technique in all cases of heatstroke.

Pugsley said he was aware of limited use of the technology at a few places in California, including Stanford Medical Center in Palo Alto and Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno, and the San Antonio Fire Department in Texas.

Dr. Anish Narang, assistant medical director of emergency medicine at Banner University Medical Center in Phoenix, said the protocol was adopted last summer.

“This cold water immersion therapy is actually the standard of care for treating heatstroke patients,” he said.