Heat cost the U.S. 162 billion dollars in 2024, and now, in June 2026, with some of the hottest temperatures recorded across the globe, that number will only go up. Heat is the deadliest weather this country has. It killed more than 21,000 Americans between 1999 and 2023, and it does not kill evenly. It kills Black Americans at nearly three times the rate of white Americans, because the same hands that redlined those neighborhoods left them without trees or shade, and now they run as much as 13 degrees hotter than the blocks across town. Baltimore came within a few degrees of its record of 107 this summer.
This is a call to the government to make change, and it is a call to the common person, who would find that it helps them too. We have old people, mothers, children, who need to be able to stand this heat. New York City has done it for ages, out of tradition. Other countries use fountains for heat reduction and free public drinking water. When a city refuses, that decision is not thrift. It is lazy and it is cowardly.
New York opens its fire hydrants, responsibly, with a spray cap that drops the flow from more than a thousand gallons a minute to 25. The city runs thousands of fountains, hundreds in the neighborhoods that need them most. It is merely a tradition being held in New York, and it is doable anywhere.
What I am proposing will not be cheap, and it will not drop city temperatures drastically. But it will improve quality of life, and it will reduce fatalities, not just by repairing fountains but by implementing cheap mobile fountains that can be made available when temperatures become dangerous. Any good investment requires something to be put into it, whether capital, labor, or innovation, something put in for the good of the people. The return comes back in the reduction of ER costs, ambulance runs, fuel for ambulances, and the hours of work required to mitigate the damage done by heat. Every ambulance run uses water. Every patient admitted uses water. Reduction of those costs and the preservation of life are the immediate quantifiable benefits of this preventative investment.
Baltimore City is full of dead fountains outside dying buildings because somewhere in our history we decided what mattered long before buildings like the Waxter Center for Senior Citizens were at risk of losing funding. The Waxter served Baltimore seniors for more than half a century, and it doubled as a summer cooling station. In the still of the night, without so much as a whisper, the city closed it this May, right when those seniors needed it most, because its air conditioning gave out, and now it studies whether to repair the building or tear it down. Baltimore has fountains sitting off, outside dying buildings, places that could be revitalized. There are at least three off the top of my head.
Maintenance and vandalism are a given. New York finds a way to do it with a significantly larger population, and it has not let vandalism kill a tradition. Maintenance is important, and it could be done better. The neglect of the Key Bridge repairs serves as a prime example of how it should have been done better. Especially when we see anti-unhoused architecture on the benches around city parks and outside buildings, it is clear that our capitalist greed is writing the rulebook for how we maintain our infrastructure.
I live in a city where convenience stores keep cold drinks behind locked doors with alarms that require an attendant to open. Someone stands outside, begging for just a bottle of water. Begging for the bare minimum. I am not mad at the inconvenience of needing an attendant. I am upset that this country attempts to feign greatness while letting people starve on the streets, as it finds ways to make public spaces less accessible and less safe for the unhoused. Water, the source of life, something we stole from the earth, bottled, priced, and then kept out of reach.
In May 2023, a gas station owner falsely accused 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton of stealing four bottles of water, chased him more than 130 yards, and shot him in the back. He had taken nothing. On June 1, 2026, a jury found him not guilty. That whole situation could have been prevented if something we all need to survive were not something we needed to steal. The cost of a water bottle should not justify fear, nor should a situation of theft in a large city where desperation is a result of historical oppression.
There is nothing humane, moral, or ethical about restricting access to drinkable water. This is not a handout for unhoused folks. It is a failsafe to protect all of us as we weather this increasingly warm climate. No one should have to pay for drinkable water, ever. It is almost as ludicrous to me as charging for breathable air, and the only reason no one has done that yet is that it is unfeasible. To cut off access to breathable air in order to hoard it would be an immense task, one that would be met with protests. Yet for some reason drinkable water is something you are okay paying for. You have become a willing victim of injustice as greed drives lack of access to our lifesource and puts a price tag on it. It is not a handout if it is preventative, and what it prevents is cost and loss of life, while providing security, access, and relief.
And it gives us back what we have been starving for. Kids playing near fountains. Adults gathering for events and meals. Musicians sitting by the water, drawing crowds. People off their couches and back in each other’s lives. Community cannot just be us coming together to protest the powers that be and beg for the change of systems. We need to live within our communities. These streets have history. They hold so many stories yet to be written.
So here is the choice, and it is the only one left to a city that wants to prove its benevolence. Find ways to open the hydrants, responsibly, the way it has been done for a hundred years. Fix the fountains rotting outside the buildings you let die. Put water where the heat is. This is not a call for frivolous waste. It is one person advocating for preservation through strategy. It is how a city shows that we care about our citizens, all of them, that we care about visitors, that we care about life. There is no other choice that proves it. There is only turning the water on, or admitting the greatness was never there.
By Gemma Flora Ortwerth
Gemma Ortwerth 
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