Amazon turns headquarters into cooling center amid Seattle heat wave

The exterior of The Spheres can be seen at the Amazon.com Inc. headquarters in Seattle, Washington on May 20, 2021.

David Ryder | Getty Images

Amazon is turning part of its Seattle headquarters into a public cooling center as the Pacific Northwest grapples with a record-breaking heat wave.

The air-conditioned cooling center is located in the Amazon Meeting Center, which is part of the South Lake Union corporate campus in downtown Seattle. According to the Seattle city website, the site can accommodate up to 1,000 people. Many homes in the area do not have air conditioning as Seattle’s climate is usually temperate.

The convention center is just a stone’s throw from the Amazon Spheres or the glass spheres that anchor the campus in downtown Seattle. Amazon converted the convention center into a pop-up clinic for administering Covid-19 vaccines earlier this year.

Unprecedented heat waves are sweeping the Pacific Northwest, pushing daytime temperatures into the three-digit range and causing blackouts in some parts of the region. Temperatures in Seattle surged over 100 degrees on Monday, marking the first time the city has been recorded for three consecutive three-digit days, according to the National Weather Service.

Before this week, the city had only three days in the past 126 years with the temperature hitting 100, according to a National Weather Service spokesman quoted by Scientific American. Scientists say climate change makes such extremely high temperatures more common.

Despite the intense heat, Amazon warehouses in Kent, Washington, remained open, the Seattle Times reported on Sunday. A facility in the Kent warehouse complex was running “power hours” in some departments where workers were told to move as fast as possible for an hour to increase productivity, the Times reported, citing workers at the facility. Amazon spokeswoman Maria Boschetti denied that the company was running electricity hours in this facility.

Elsewhere, Portland hit a record high of 112 degrees on Sunday, just a day after hitting a high of 108 degrees. The National Weather Service expects Portland temperatures to rise to 114 degrees on Monday, breaking the heat record for the third time in a row.