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This article is part of Insider's "The True Cost of Extreme Weather" project. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/what-climate-change-crisis-extreme-weather-is-costing-you-2023-9">Read more here</a>.When Lois Nigrin flew to Arizona with her husband, Joe, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their first date, she never imagined she might not make it home.But one miscalculation on a hot day would soon leave her in a coma. Her legs, buttocks, back, and head would have third-degree burns. Her organs would start to fail. Her kids would fly in to say their goodbyes."I don't think I had a true understanding of what heatstroke was," Lois Nigrin told Insider. "I had no idea that it could kill you."Lois Nigrin is a teacher in Nebraska. She was 54 and healthy in June 2019 when, about 9 a.m., she and her husband started to hike up Camelback Mountain, a brown outcropping that rises 1,400 feet above Phoenix.She grew up on a farm, working in the fields with her dad. She's no stranger to heat. What's more, she and her husband had been training for this hike, knowing it would be hot.They brought plenty of water with them, though they didn't bring electrolytes. They had hiked Camelback before, several years prior, but that was in October.Phoenix was 107 degrees Fahrenheit that day. That was also Lois Nigrin's internal temperature a few hours later when a helicopter lifted her off the mountain.<div type="image" title="A hand holding a phone, with a photo of Lois and her husband on their hike on the day of the incident." height="2000" width="2666" msid="103845380" hostid="261" sizebytes="184624"></div><h2>The hike went wrong quickly</h2>As Lois and Joe Nigrin neared the top of the mountain, under the glaring sun, they saw people scrambling up rocky cliffs to the peak ahead of them. Lois Nigrin was feeling tired and didn't want to climb the rocks, so they turned around.On their descent, two other hikers asked the couple to take their picture, then returned the favor. Lois Nigrin has no memory of that interaction, even when she looks at the photo.The last thing she remembers is spotting a small tree, telling her husband she was "just so hot," and asking to pause in its shade.According to Joe Nigrin, they took a break there and then kept walking down. He was getting worried. She was talking about her legs feeling like rubber. He started to pour water over her head and back. She insisted she was fine, but then she was leaning on him until he was basically carrying her.She didn't realize it at the time, but her body could no longer regulate its temperature. She was succumbing to heatstroke, the most serious heat-related illness.Finally, she told him to go get help."I didn't want to leave her there to die, but she was insistent that she couldn't get down the mountain," Joe Nigrin said.<h2>From helicopter to ambulance, to another ambulance</h2>At the bottom of the mountain, Joe Nigrin found a ranger, who took off up the mountain toward Lois. An ambulance arrived, and the EMTs followed where the ranger had gone.They found her unconscious lying on a large boulder that was so hot it was burning her skin. First responders lifted her into a helicopter, which carried her to a parking lot at the base of the mountain, where an ambulance took her to the nearest hospital. Joe Nigrin followed in the couple's rental car.According to Lois Nigrin, when she arrived at the emergency department, the doctors quickly determined she couldn't stay there. She had to go to a burn center.So another ambulance took her to the Arizona Burn Center. In the heat waves of the past two summers, the institution has been overwhelmed with patients who get heatstroke in record temperatures or sustain burns from touching pavement.In June, July, and August last year, 85 people were admitted to the Arizona Burn Center with heat-related burns, and seven of them died from their injuries. Dr. Kevin Foster, the center's director, told Insider that he expected this summer's toll to end up even higher. Though June was relatively cool, "July was absolutely hellish," he said, adding that the center admitted about 50 patients that month. Overall, across the planet, average temperatures are rising due to humans' emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide, which mostly comes from burning fossil fuels for energy. Hotspots like Phoenix are suffering increasingly brutal summer heat as a result, putting more people at risk for health emergencies like heatstroke. Last week, NASA announced that this summer was the hottest since global record keeping began in 1880.The type of heat that nearly killed Lois Nigrin could add $1 billion every summer to US health care costs for things like emergency-department visits, according to an estimate from the Center for American Progress.The Nigrins know the ordeal that could lie ahead for the victims of heat. Getting to the hospital is just the beginning. For Lois Nigrin, that began weeks of struggling to survive, months of therapy and skin grafts, and a mountain of bills to pay.<div type="image" title="Lois Nigrin victim of heat stroke." height="3000" width="2000" msid="103845382" hostid="261" sizebytes="111896"></div><h2>As Lois' organs began to shut down, doctors said she likely wouldn't survive</h2>The morning after the disastrous hike, at the burn center, Joe Nigrin said a doctor told him to call any family who would want to see his wife and get them there as quickly as possible. "I told him that, 'Well, our whole family is 1,500 miles away in the Midwest,' and he said, 'I would strongly suggest they get out here,'" Joe Nigrin said.Lois Nigrin was poised to die that night.Friends helped their four children arrange flights from Nebraska and places to stay in Phoenix. Lois Nigrin's sister flew in from New Mexico. Everyone was there by the evening.She survived the night. But as her organs threatened to fail, she was transferred to the intensive-care unit at a local hospital. Healthcare workers employed more machines and tubes to keep her alive. A ventilator breathed for her. A dialysis machine took over for her kidneys.<h2>In the ICU, confusion and hallucinations tormented Lois</h2>Lois Nigrin didn't die. Instead, she slowly emerged from her medically induced coma.She said she remembered little snippets from this time: her husband sitting next to her, her kids telling her to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth. They later told her she was gasping for air after the ICU workers removed the ventilator tube from her airway.She was hallucinating: children in the hallway, stuffed animals in her bed. At one point, she noticed that her hand was glowing red. That scared her."What's wrong with my hand?" she wondered."I remember thinking I would move my hand and try to see what it was, and I literally just could not even move my hand," she said. "Then I started thinking, 'Oh, my gosh, if it stops glowing, does that mean I've died?'"Her husband later explained that she was seeing the red light of the blood-oxygen monitor clipped to her finger.One day, she asked him when they were going home."I remember him just looking at me with tears in his eyes, going, 'Honey, you almost died. You can't go home,'" she said. "I was just like, 'I have no idea what you're talking about.'"Her sense of time was wonky, too. One day, the nurses had her sit up for the first time. The next day, she thought, they tried to feed her applesauce, but she couldn't stomach it. Her daughter later told her she'd sat up and tried applesauce on the same day, at the same time."That's very hard as a person, to know that you went through stuff like that, and you can't make any sense of any of it," she said four years later, sitting in her classroom the day before her students arrived for the new school year. "And you can't understand why it happened. And you don't understand everything that was happening."She added: "I just have had to let that all go. It's never going to be my job to understand this, because I can't."All in all, she was in the ICU for 10 days.<div type="image" title="A photo of a woman's legs with burn scars." height="2000" width="2666" msid="103845383" hostid="261" sizebytes="425028"></div><h2>Learning how to swallow, walk, and draw circles</h2>Still, she couldn't go home yet. She couldn't swallow. She couldn't lift her arms. She had to relearn all that in another unit of the hospital, starting with eating applesauce as workers watched to make sure she didn't choke.Her caregivers were helping revive her brain, too. They would tell her a simple story then ask her questions about it. They had her balance a checkbook, she said.At one point, Lois Nigrin said, they asked her to draw a clock showing the time 3 o'clock. No problem, she thought. But she couldn't even draw a circle.Sometimes she touched the back of her head and came away with clumps of hair. She was burned there, too.Over a week, she worked her way up to eating crackers. She regained her sense of time, lost the hallucinations, and came to understand what had happened to her.When she could walk to the nurse's station and back by herself, they sent her to a rehabilitation center. For another week, she worked on climbing the stairs, getting in and out of a car, and her hand-eye coordination.Finally, she returned to Nebraska."Probably the best thing that I ever felt was that airplane landing and being back home," Joe Nigrin said. "Knowing my best friend was back home was probably the best thing."Rehab continued there, and Lois Nigrin went to a hospital to get skin grafted from her thighs onto the burns on her lower legs, buttocks, and back.In mid-August, she returned to work for the beginning of the school year, cane in hand and legs wrapped in bandages. Her daughters set up her classroom for her, and she started out part time, easing her way back to full time.<h2>The Nigrins lost time, wages, and birthdays, but they kept Lois</h2>Lois Nigrin's legs are scarred from the burns and grafts, so she doesn't wear shorts anymore. She has some bald spots where her head was burned. She doesn't have as much energy as she used to. She walks more carefully. She has more trouble remembering names, though she's not sure whether that's from the heatstroke or because she's getting older.The bills had started arriving in the mail while she was still in the hospital. Between the helicopter, ambulances, emergency care, the ICU, rehab, and skin grafts, the whole ordeal cost the Nigrins more than $4,000 in medical bills; the family spent about $2,000 more to bring everybody to Phoenix. The couple's health insurance covered more than $280,000 of expenses related to the heatstroke, according to documents reviewed by Insider.The whole family lost wages while they were stuck in Arizona. Lois Nigrin missed two of her kids' birthdays, as well as her own. She had planned to help her son move into a new apartment, but that time came and went while she was sick.Still, she said, "I look back on it now, and I think how lucky I am."Her daughter just graduated from high school, and her son finished law school. Her other son got married this month — "all the great things that I would have missed out on if it hadn't been for wonderful doctors and so many people praying for me," Lois Nigrin said, adding: "So I'm a very, very lucky person."

Arizona heat almost killed Lois Nigrin. Her coma, burns, and medical bills show the dangers of heat that many Americans face today.

<ul class="summary-list"><li>A massive fire and explosion erupted at a Texas dairy farm this week, according to authorities</li><li>The fiery blast killed more than 18,000 cows at South Fork Dairy Farms in the Texas city of Dimmitt.</li></ul>Nearly 20,000 cows were killed and one person was injured in a massive explosion and fire at a Texas dairy farm this week, making it the deadliest inferno disaster for cattle in the United States in the last decade.The fiery blast erupted at South Fork Dairy Farms in the Texas city of Dimmitt on Monday night, according to authorities. Photos <a href="https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid02Bozshk61j7hb5nLG8YnxEdtS2MRVXMJ8gitqBdHdpbVSTkHoxGnT43L1B9Y7PG2Cl&amp;id=100069128143279" target="_blank" rel="noopener">released by the Castro County Sheriff's Office</a> showed huge plumes of smoke billowing from the facility during the disaster. Only a small percentage of the cows at the farm survived the tragedy, <a href="https://www.newschannel10.com/2023/04/11/reports-upwards-18000-cattle-lost-explosion-dimmitt-dairy-farm/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">according to local news outlet KFDA</a>, which reported that more than 18,000 cattle perished. "There's some that survived, there's some that are probably injured to the point where they'll have to be destroyed," Castro County Sheriff Sal Rivera said of the animals, KFDA reported.The Animal Welfare Institute told Insider that the blaze was the deadliest barn fire for cattle in the country and the deadliest barn fire in Texas since the non-profit organization started tracking barn fires in 2013.Hundreds of thousands of farm animals are killed every year as a result of barn fires and since 2013 more than 6.4 million animals — most of which were chickens — have perished in barn blazes, <a href="https://awionline.org/content/barn-fires" target="_blank" rel="noopener">according to the organization</a>. The organization said that the "devastating numbers, which likely do not even represent the full scale of the problem, serve as an urgent reminder to the industry to prioritize fire safety and prevention on farms.""We hope the industry will remain focused on this issue and strongly encourage farms to adopt commonsense fire safety measures," said Allie Granger, policy associate for AWI's farm animal program. "It is hard to imagine anything worse than being burned alive."The cause of the Monday's inferno remains under investigation, but Rivera <a href="https://cw39.com/news/texas/castro-county-sheriff-gives-update-on-monday-explosion-at-south-fork-dairy/amp/">told the KIAH news outlet</a> that the initial explosion could have been caused by a machinery malfunction. The explosion erupted, causing a fire which then spread to a building on the property used to hold the cattle, Rivera said, citing witnesses, according to the report. First responders at the scene discovered a worker trapped inside the facility and fire crews were able to rescue that person, who was ultimately hospitalized, the Castro County Sheriff's Office said."The magnitude of the fire and the amount of people that were here, we were very fortunate that it was less than what we had," Rivera said, <a href="https://abc7amarillo.com/news/local/we-were-very-fortunate-castro-county-sheriff-sal-rivera-provides-update-on-south-fork-dairy-fire-texas-dimmitt-mike-schouten-mission-dairy-panhandle-industry-cows" target="_blank" rel="noopener">according to KVII</a>. "We had just one injured it could have been a lot worse."

Nearly 20,000 cows are believed to have been killed in an explosion and fire at a Texas dairy farm

<ul class="summary-list"><li>The world wonder <keyword id="13545183" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="machu-picchu" source="Orion">Machu Picchu</keyword> is under threat from a fire that started on Tuesday.</li><li>Authorities say the fire has "not been possible" to control because it's so remote, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/perus-machu-picchu-threatened-by-wildfire-2022-06-30/">per Reuters.</a></li></ul>A forest fire in <keyword id="12479525" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="peru" source="Orion">Peru</keyword> is threatening to engulf the ancient Incan ruins of Machu Picchu, one of the <keyword id="14337967" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="seven-wonders-of-the-world" source="Orion">seven wonders of the world</keyword>, as local firefighters struggle to contain the blaze in the remote Andes Mountains.The fire was started Tuesday by agricultural burning in the area and has so far engulfed around 49 acres of land, the mayor of the city of Cusco said Wednesday, per <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/perus-machu-picchu-threatened-by-wildfire-2022-06-30/">Reuters.</a>The blaze has been difficult to combat because it's so remote, Roberto Abarca, director of the Cusco risk management and security office, told Reuters."We have already been fighting the forest fire for two days and it has not been possible to get it under control, given the area is quite inaccessible," Abarca told the outlet.<div type="image" title="An emergency personnel worker puts out a forest fire in Machu Picchu, Peru, in this image released on June 29, 2022." height="821" width="524" msid="92591043" hostid="261" sizebytes="97276"></div>The heritage site has been threatened by fires before. In September 2020, <a href="https://twitter.com/SERNANP/status/1305262959686549507?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1305262959686549507%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fandina.pe%2FIngles%2Fnoticia-peru-forest-fire-at-historic-sanctuary-of-machu-picchu-controlled-813640.aspx">firefighters took several hours</a> on foot to quash a fire inside the complex itself.Machu Picchu is what remains of an <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/274/">Incan stone citadel</a> high up in the Andes Mountains. It was built more than 500 years ago and was rediscovered in 1911, later becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site and a major tourist attraction.It was voted one of the seven wonders of the world, along with the Great Wall of China, Chichén Itzá, Petra, Christ the Redeemer, the Colosseum, and the Taj Mahal.

A fire is raging toward Machu Picchu, and authorities say it's 'not been possible to get it under control'

<ul class="summary-list"><li>A piece of burning <keyword id="6360701" type="DEFINITION" weightage="60" keywordseo="spacex">SpaceX</keyword> rocket debris landed on a man's farm in eastern Washington State. </li><li>It was part of the second stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, which was found after a launch on March 25.</li><li>The debris left a 4-inch dent in the ground but no one was hurt, authorities said. </li></ul>A piece of burning rocket debris seen streaking across the Pacific Northwest sky last week crashed on a farm in eastern Washington state, authorities said.After the March 25 event, a farmer discovered a nearly intact piece of rocket in a private field, The Tri-City Herald reported.The approximately 5-foot composite-overwrapped pressure vessel used for storing helium left a nearly 4-inch dent in the ground, Grant County sheriff's spokesman, Kyle Foreman, said. No one was hurt, he added.The National Weather Service in Seattle has said the widely reported bright objects in the sky on March 25 were remnants of the second stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket leaving comet-like trails as they burned up upon re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere.The farmer, who authorities said didn't want to be identified, suspected the debris may have come from the rocket and left a message with the sheriff's office over the weekend, Foreman said. Deputies responded Monday and contacted SpaceX officials. SpaceX confirmed it was part of the rocket and has since retrieved it, Foreman said.It's not the first time rocket debris has rained on US soil. The same situation occurred after a test flight of SpaceX's Starship prototype on Tuesday<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-new-starship-prototype-sn11-lands-amid-debris-2021-3">.</a> As it got closer to the ground, the rocket was supposed to reignite its engines to flip upright and land gently, as <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-new-starship-prototype-sn11-lands-amid-debris-2021-3">Insider previously reported.</a> Instead, its onboard cameras froze after the engine ignition sequence.The Falcon 9 is a reusable two-stage rocket designed by SpaceX to transport people and payloads into the Earth's orbit and beyond, according to SpaceX. There have been 111 launches and 71 landings, according to the company.

A piece of burning debris from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket crashed down on a Washington state farm, authorities said

<ul><li><keyword id="6964390" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="air-quality-levels-in-delhi">Air quality levels in Delhi</keyword>, the most polluted mega-city in the world, had already dropped to ‘poor’ on Monday and is expected to worsen.</li><li>Farmers continue to burn stubble with some in Punjab recently protesting against the lack of compensation for using alternatives to crop burning. </li><li>There seems to be a lack in coordinated action among governments.</li></ul>Despite ample warnings, it appears that Indian authorities have again been unable to wield enough pressure or incentivise farmers sufficiently in Northern India to halt the practice of burning stubble. <a href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/stubble-burning-doubles-delhi-pollution-harvard-study/articleshow/63593281.cms">Studies</a> have shown that this stubble burning contributes to at least half of the pollution and toxic haze problem in India’s capital region. The air quality in Delhi and surrounding cities reach toxic levels every year in October and November as the temperature drops and the pollutants stay suspended as the wind slows down. While the number of stubble burning sites seem lower than last year according to satellite data, that number might go up in the coming week. Air quality levels in Delhi had already dropped to ‘poor’ as of Monday, according to the Air Quality Index. A combination of stubble burning in the Northern states, vehicle exhaust and construction dust contribute to toxic levels of pollution in Delhi, which is the most <a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/delhi-world-s-most-polluted-city-mumbai-worse-than-beijing-who/story-m4JFTO63r7x4Ti8ZbHF7mM.html">polluted city</a> in the world, according to the World Health Organisation. Despite penalties and a ban in place by the National Green Tribunal on stubble burning, farmers in have continued to burn stubble. Some farmers in Punjab have also recently been protesting against the lack of compensation for using alternatives by<a href="https://indianexpress.com/article/india/defiant-farmers-burn-stubble-post-videos-online-5403716/"> posting videos </a>of stubble burning online. Insufficient compensation In recent years, India’s central and state governments have attempted to introduce financial incentives and subsidies on the farm equipment needed to help farmers switch to cleaner methods of getting rid of harvest stubble instead of burning crop residue to clear farmlands for the next sowing season. However, farmers contend that despite the subsidies these machines are still very expensive and the cost of these machines has shot up further ever since the government announced these subsidies. Instead, the farmers have demanded <a href="https://www.livemint.com/Politics/TnZW7bjXA3wHbeqqDYd3pM/Delhis-air-quality-set-to-worsen-as-stubble-burning-intensi.html">direct compensation</a> of ₹200 ($2.71) per quintal of paddy harvested. One farmer in Punjab <a href="https://www.livemint.com/Politics/TnZW7bjXA3wHbeqqDYd3pM/Delhis-air-quality-set-to-worsen-as-stubble-burning-intensi.html">told</a> the Mint - “The number of machines that have been purchased on subsidy will not even cover 10% of Punjab’s paddy area... besides it costs farmers over ₹5,000 per acre for straw management by rented machines.” Additionally, Punjab also imposes a fine of ₹2,500 per acre, which dwarfs in comparison to the cost of alternatives, farmers say. “I will set fire to my farm to clear it. If need be, I will pay the fine because there is no other option,” a farmer in Punjab <a href="https://www.news18.com/news/india/delhi-still-grasping-for-breath-as-stubble-burning-continues-in-punjab-haryana-1546059.html">told </a>News18. Removing crop residue is also seen as a labour-intensive process in both Punjab and Haryana, both states have shifted to high mechanisation in recent years. With farm labour being either unavailable or too expensive, burning the stubble is seen as a cheaper option. To be sure, efforts are also underway by various non-governmental and local organisations to create a market for the stubble for use in biofuels, for instance, but they will take time to catch on. The governments also appear to be lacking in coordinated action to address the problem. Delhi’s Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has reportedly said that his government took up the issue with the other state governments but no “concrete action” had been taken by them. Meanwhile, Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh has <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/sympathies-with-farmers-but-dont-burn-crop-residue-amarinder-singh-1932592">urged </a>the central government to grant ₹100 per quintal as compensation to Punjab farmers, failing which he said it would be tough for the state to control stubble burning. Delhi also plans to implement emergency measures in the coming weeks if the air quality worsens including a prohibition on burning of waste, curb on construction activity and the use of diesel generator sets in the city.

You Searched For "farm burning" and got 5 results

Arizona heat almost killed Lois Nigrin. Her coma, burns, and medical bills show the dangers of heat that many Americans face today.

Morgan McFall-Johnsen

Nearly 20,000 cows are believed to have been killed in an explosion and fire at a Texas dairy farm

Natalie Musumeci

A fire is raging toward Machu Picchu, and authorities say it's 'not been possible to get it under control'

Matthew Loh

A piece of burning debris from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket crashed down on a Washington state farm, authorities said

Associated Press,Zahra Tayeb

Indian govt on back foot as stubble burning worsens air pollution in the national capital

Rimin Dutt

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