José Guerrero’s cellphone buzzes from morning to midnight with sweaty pleas for assist: The air-conditioner fan simply stop. My grandma is caught in a 90-degree home. My kids are overheating. Please come, it’s so sizzling.
As Phoenix slogs by way of a report 20 straight days of 110-degree or greater temperatures, Mr. Guerrero, 33, has emerged as perhaps essentially the most important employee in a city determined to remain cool: the A.C. restore man.
“We live in a city where you have to have it,” he mentioned. “If they need us, we go.”
Summer is all the time his busy season, however air-conditioner service corporations across the Southwest are seeing voracious demand — a results of record-breaking temperatures searing the nation from Florida to California, compounded by a scarcity of expert technicians and gear.
So now, Mr. Guerrero, his two brothers and their father roll out seven days every week, heading for suffocating attics and tar-shingled rooftops throughout the Valley of the Sun to coax ailing air-conditioners again to life. They repair leaking refrigerant strains, exchange burned-out capacitors and attempt to decrease Phoenix’s temperature just a few levels.
But conserving town cool is sweltering work. They endure the warmth by guzzling water and wrapping moist cloths round their necks, and attempt to keep away from burning their palms on scalding sheet steel or fainting inside crawl areas the place they are saying temperatures can soar to 150 levels.
“We call it going to sleep,” José Guerrero mentioned. “It’s bad up there.”
The males use thermometers to gauge temperatures inside homes and across the equipment, which regularly soar properly previous the outside air. “163 degrees in the attic,” Edi Guerrero, 30, one other brother, reported after coming house drenched in sweat one afternoon.
Most white-collar employees round Phoenix have hunkered inside their air-conditioned properties or icy workplaces.
But about 20 p.c of Arizona’s employees spend their days exterior, in response to an evaluation by the Union of Concerned Scientists, harvesting crops and powering Arizona’s progress by constructing new roads, semiconductor factories and condos.
The state legislature has rejected efforts to write down warmth protections into legislation, however this week, Gov. Katie Hobbs mentioned her administration would ship inspectors to test whether or not employees have entry to enough water, shade and relaxation within the excessive warmth.
On Saturday, the youngest Guerrero brother, Alex, 22, spent the 116-degree afternoon checking air-conditioners at an house complicated when he felt his breath quicken and his eyes droop. He requested his girlfriend to drive him house, and when he staggered inside, he referred to as out for his mom. and collapsed.
“Next thing I knew, I was on the ground,” he mentioned.
The household referred to as 911 and as they waited for paramedics to reach, they knew from expertise to chill him down with moist cloths and gave him sips of a sports activities drink. A half-hour later, he sat shirtless contained in the household’s cell house, shaky however recovering: “It was just too damn hot.”
The Guerreros by no means deliberate for air-conditioning to change into the household business.
Roberto Guerrero, 51, who immigrated from Chihuahua, Mexico, to Phoenix 30 years in the past, mentioned it was a second profession after a sudden sickness in 2008 left him paralyzed. During an agonizing three-year restoration, as he realized to stroll and choose up spoons once more, the household’s financial savings had been drained, and so they had been evicted.
“I needed to do something,” Mr. Guerrero mentioned.
He initially tried to promote air-conditioning items, however mentioned he realized that whereas few folks needed to purchase, everybody wanted repairs.
José mentioned he joined his father after shedding his company job with a supply app through the pandemic. The elder Mr. Guerrero nonetheless walks with a slight limp, so climbing to the roof, the place most residential air-conditioners sit, are treacherous even with the safety of a powerful rope.
The dad and mom, siblings and three of José’s kids reside collectively in a drafty cell house on the Sun ‘n Sand trailer park on the edge of an interstate in northwest Phoenix. They eat homemade enchiladas and watch television crammed around a kitchen table, talking over the day’s jobs and joking about who wilts quickest within the warmth.
They personal their cell house, however José and Roberto say they dream about shopping for some land method west of Phoenix, the place they’ll elevate chickens and horses and plant fruit timber, like their family members in Chihuahua.
They are weary of patching up the cell house, and are nonetheless fixing a flimsy roof that peeled off in a windstorm months in the past. They just lately changed their wheezing outdated window A.C. unit with a brand new wall-mounted one.
And dwelling within the nation, José mentioned, may give him an excuse to disregard the service calls pinging his cellphone on weekends.
Sometimes, the Guerreros fear they don’t seem to be charging sufficient. Repairs can run from $500 for a comparatively easy repair, to $10,000 for a brand new unit, and most of their clients can’t afford practically that a lot.
They say they find yourself knocking a whole lot of {dollars} off restore payments for struggling clients, taking fruit or home made meals as a substitute. The different day, a consumer whose home hit greater than 100 levels slipped $100 into Jose’s hand, and requested him to do what he may. When one other buyer couldn’t afford the labor prices of putting in an electrical half, José mentioned he provided to stroll him by way of it on FaceTime.
“It’s the reason we’re poor, but we’re happy,” the elder Mr. Guerrero mentioned.
On a pre-dawn Tuesday morning, it was already 93 levels when José and his father pulled as much as a house in a working-class neighborhood within the Phoenix suburb of Mesa.
The buyer, Nestor Flores, a roofer, had referred to as the Guerreros when his June electrical invoice hit $570. His leaky rooftop air-conditioning unit had been working continuously at full pace whereas solely burping out tepid air, making the home so swampy that his three kids had began spending summer time days with their grandparents. He mentioned José had charged him 1000’s lower than different restore corporations.
“He’s cutting me a break,” Mr. Flores mentioned.
José was already sweating by way of his work shirt as he clambered up a ladder, steadied by his father, and onto the roof spangled with hen poop. He pulled out a drill and undid the bolts holding the 500-pound unit in place.
He needed to work quick. Other calls had been coming in, and the temperature had simply zoomed above 100. In an hour, the roof can be a skillet.
Later that afternoon, Phoenix formally broke its report for the longest stretch ever of 110-degree days. It was large news for climate geeks and news shops throughout the area, and for the Guerreros, a reminder of much more depressing weeks forward.
“We’ve been here all our lives,” José mentioned. “You don’t get used to it.”
Source: www.nytimes.com