[This Person] Why Did Yoodonggyun, Mayor of Mapo-gu, Operate the 'Heat-Quick Cooling Refrigerator' at the Dong Resident Center's Heat Shelter?

16 Neighborhood Community Centers as Heat Relief Shelters... 'Mapo Deowisunsak Refrigerator' Installed... Operated for One Month from August 4 to September 3... Supplying About 100 Bottles of Water Each

Yoo Dong-gyun, Mayor of Mapo District, visited the Seongsan 2-dong Community Center cooling shelter on the 6th and checked the 'Heat Relief Refrigerator'.

[Asia Economy Reporter Jong-il Park] “We must carefully check if there are any inconveniences so that any resident can comfortably come in, drink cool water, and cool off for a while.”

On the afternoon of the 6th, Yoodonggyun, Mayor of Mapo-gu, visited the heat relief shelter at Seongsan 2-dong Community Center and filled the ‘Heat Relief Refrigerator’ with bottled water.

Mapo-gu (Mayor Yoodonggyun) announced that starting from the 4th, it has placed ‘Mapo Heat Relief Refrigerators’ in heat relief shelters at community centers across the district to provide residents with cool bottled water.

This is one of the district’s swift heatwave countermeasures to prevent various summer heat-related illnesses and damages as daytime temperatures recently have been hovering around 35 degrees Celsius in scorching heat.

The ‘Mapo Heat Relief Refrigerator,’ operating for one month from August 4 to September 3, is available at 16 heat relief shelters in Mapo-gu community centers on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. When a heatwave warning is issued, it is also available on Saturdays and public holidays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The district plans to supply about 100 bottles of 500ml bottled water daily to each heat relief shelter. To allow more residents to use it, the supply is limited to one bottle per person, and the amount of bottled water supplied will be flexibly adjusted depending on weather conditions and circumstances in each neighborhood.

A district official expressed gratitude, saying, “A local bottled water company, upon hearing about the provision of cool water to residents exhausted by the heat, strongly sympathized with the district’s purpose and donated 10,000 bottles of water to support the effort.”

The district is making every effort to help vulnerable groups such as elderly living alone and single-parent families have a healthy summer amid the overlapping challenges of COVID-19 and the heatwave.

Although many local governments closed senior centers due to concerns about the spread of COVID-19, the district made a decisive decision to operate 155 senior centers in the area as heat relief shelters, considering that elderly people have no suitable places to escape the heat.

Additionally, disaster helpers composed of life support workers, local autonomous disaster prevention teams, and health care professionals are proactively conducting heatwave damage prevention activities.

Furthermore, cooling supplies such as fans and cool mats are being delivered to vulnerable elderly people living alone, and since the 26th of last month, the district has started a project, the first in Seoul, to provide ‘portable air conditioners’ to 464 energy-vulnerable households.

Yoodonggyun, Mayor of Mapo-gu, said, “Since sudden rises in body temperature can lead to heat-related illnesses that may become emergencies threatening life, the ‘Heat Relief Refrigerator’ is a measure to prevent this in advance. Besides providing bottled water, we will do our best to carefully care for heatwave-vulnerable residents such as elderly living alone.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.