| Before we start, a note: In case you missed it last week, Capital Letters will land in your inbox every Monday, instead of Sunday. The crime, the Covid, the politics and the potholes: Capital Letters — Keeping track of Delhi's week, one beat at a time, through the eyes and words of HT's My Delhi section, with all the perspective, context and analysis you need. Good morning! April was a cruel month, in many ways. The weather was among the cruelest of them all. It does seem like we talk about the weather a lot in this newsletter (when we aren't talking about Covid-19). Northwestern and central India smouldered through the hottest April in 122 years. This was largely because of the complete and utter lack of any rain, or even cloudy skies, said Met officials, warning that May would be just as bad for the region. Delhi, specifically, bore much of the brunt of this. The Capital barely stayed on its feet during the second-hottest April in 72 years, with an average maximum temperature of a bone-melting 40.2°C. April has only ever been hotter in 2010, when the average ticked up to 40.4°C. For context, the normal average is 36.3°C. The city closed off the month with the Sports Complex weather station in East Delhi's Akshardham clocking a maximum of 47.1°C on Saturday. To be sure, the station is located in a complex dominated by concrete and plastic, exacerbating the already-unforgiving heat. But such situations are not uncommon in urban settings, where green patches are hard to come by, even in a fairly green metropolis as Delhi. Experts call this phenomenon – where an area dominated by concrete is hotter than a green one – the Urban Heat Island effect. HT's Jasjeev Gandhiok went into this in some detail in an explainer here. In a nutshell, experts said UHI occurs when cities replace natural land cover with dense concretisation that absorbs and retains heat. This helps the extent to which hyper-local factors determine, and cause wild fluctuations, on a locality's temperature. For instance, why is the Mayur Vihar station often Delhi's coolest but Sports Complex the hottest, despite both being in the eastern part of the city? It's because the former station is installed in a school that has plenty of natural cover and neighbours the Smriti Van forest. The urban heat island (UHI) effect is one where an area dominated by concrete structures shows a higher maximum as compared to a relatively greener area. The Sports Complex station is therefore very different to say Safdarjung or Mayur Vihar, which have a lot of greenery. It is also unfair to compare it to Hisar [in Haryana, and often among India's hottest spots] which is a non-urbanised location, said RK Jenamani, scientist at IMD. Or sample this, why is the weather station at Delhi Ridge (the city's green lungs) among the hottest, despite an abundance of green cover? Simple, the station itself is surrounded by hard rocks that heat up fairly rapidly. The heatwave has also led to a perceptible uptick in the number of fires across Delhi. Data from the Delhi Fire Services showed that the agency got 26% more fire-related calls this April, compared to the month last year, 124% more calls than April 2020 (which is an unfair comparison, since most establishments were locked down), but notably 36% more than April 2019. Senior fire officials and climate experts both pinned the increasing number of fires to the dry heat, which has turned large parts of the city into tinderboxes waiting to ignite. For firefighters, it has also made an extremely challenging and dangerous job more worrisome. Many of them have to go hours without a drop of food or water, wearing extremely heavy equipment. Sushil Sehrawat, a 43-year-old firefighter, said, "Getting thirsty while conducting an operation is natural, especially in summer. But an operator cannot leave till there's an official who can relieve them. There have been times when we have worked for two hours straight without water even when we are thirsty," he said. Of course, how can Delhi's mountains of trash stray far from the news cycle? Experts have repeatedly warned that the city's three landfills (in Ghazipur, Bhalswa and Okhla) aren't just unhygienic, but that leachate from these can contaminate the water supply, they're prone to collapse, and that methane emissions during the summer months preen them for fires. And as it happened, the Bhalswa landfill in northwest Delhi went up in flames on Tuesday, a blaze that kept going for the next three days and then kept going in bits and spurts afterwards. This came only weeks after a fire at the Ghazipur landfill that went on for three days, blanketing the east Delhi neighbourhood in a toxic smog, making it nearly impossible for residents (who already contend with the eyesore and stench) to go about their life. Bhalswa is the second biggest landfill in the city, after Ghazipur, and is estimated to hold eight million tonnes of accumulated legacy waste, since dumping began in 1994. The site is spread over a 36-acre area, and hit a height of 62 metres in 2019. The landfill was exhausted in 2006, but dumping continued, official said. The Bhalswa inferno adversely impacted one unlikely institution – a school for underprivileged children located at the foot of the landfill, HT's Hemani Bhandari found. Run by an NGO, the school operates classes between standards 1 and 4, but will be shut till the fire is brought under control completely. Nayana Cherian (31), a community organiser who helps run the school near the landfill, said 110 children from the neighbourhood, who are among "the most neglected lot" study there. It's unfortunate, she lamented, that their lessons would take yet another hit, just as regular classes began to resume, after the bruising impact of the pandemic. And the landfill news gets worse. A study found that the three garbage mountains have so far cost Delhi ₹450 crore in environmental damages, with "with no noticeable progress being made to reduce the millions of tonnes of waste." Richa Singh of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) said that calling the three sites 'landfills' would be inaccurate, as they are without any proper leachate management system or a gas sucking system, and added that the three are "dump sites" that were built without adequate planning and are now constantly damaging the environment. "There are long-term health impacts including breathing problems for those regularly breathing the air near the landfill sites," she added. | 
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