Baked Apple: Heat wave hits urban northeast

JIM FITZGERALD

Asso­ci­ated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — The urban North­east baked like a potato wrapped in foil Fri­day as record-breaking, 100-degree tem­per­a­tures and steam­bath humid­ity com­bined with the heat-trapping effects of asphalt and con­crete to make mil­lions of peo­ple miserable.

The mer­cury in Newark, N.J., reached 108, the high­est tem­per­a­ture ever recorded in the city. Air­ports near Wash­ing­ton and Bal­ti­more hit 105. Philadel­phia reached 104, Boston 103, Port­land, Maine, and Con­cord, N.H., 101 and Prov­i­dence, R.I., 100. New York City hit 104 degrees, just 2 short of its all-time high, and with the oppres­sive humid­ity, it felt like 113.

Don­ald Demar­que, a handy­man, sat out­side an auto repair shop in the broil­ing Bronx, wait­ing to get the air con­di­tioner checked on his Nissan.

“It’s only work­ing at about half power,” he said. “I think if it was a reg­u­lar day I could put up with it, but not today. Today you don’t want to have the car win­dows open.”

In Bal­ti­more, a home­less Dale Brown said he buys a $3.50 day pass to ride the com­muter rail sys­tem to stay cool — and sober.

“I’m sur­prised more home­less peo­ple don’t do that,” he said. “That kills a lot of the day. One more day suc­cess­ful with­out drinking.”

An old prison in Cranston, R.I., had to bring in portable air con­di­tion­ers, fans and cold water for the 100 inmates on a cell­block with a bro­ken AC. It had been out of com­mis­sion for a month because it was so old a part had to be custom-made to fix it; the part is due Monday.

In Philadel­phia, 50 of the city’s 70 pools oper­ated on 45-minute cycles to give every­one a chance to get in. Some New York­ers were unable to take a dip to cool off at some beaches in Brook­lyn and Staten Island after mil­lions of gal­lons of raw sewage spilled from a waste­water treat­ment plant.

The heat wave wafted in from the Mid­west — it began last week­end and did not break until Fri­day in Chicago — and is a sus­pected or con­firmed cause in more than a dozen deaths around the coun­try. On Fri­day, the med­ical examiner’s office in Chicago listed heat stress or heat stroke as the cause of death for seven peo­ple. An 18-year-old land­scaper who died Thurs­day night in Louisville, Ky., had a tem­per­a­ture of 110, the coro­ner said.

Jake Crouch, a cli­ma­tol­o­gist at the National Cli­matic Data Cen­ter in Asheville, N.C., said the heat wave is tak­ing its place in dura­tion along­side deadly hot spells in 1988 and 1995 that lasted a week or more.

On Fri­day, power sup­plies were stretched, and util­i­ties were hop­ing that some busi­nesses would close early for the weekend.

Con Edi­son in New York set a record for power demand at 1 p.m., break­ing a mark set Aug. 2, 2006, util­ity spokesman Bob McGhee said.

Sev­eral thou­sand New York homes and busi­nesses were hit with black­outs; some were quickly restored. Volt­age was delib­er­ately reduced in sev­eral neigh­bor­hoods in the city and sub­urbs to keep under­ground cables from over­heat­ing; McGhee said cus­tomers wouldn’t notice.

The elec­tri­cal grid that serves 13 states, mostly in the Mid-Atlantic region, set an all-time record Thurs­day for power usage.

Dangerous-heat advi­sories and air qual­ity alerts were sent out for most of the North­east on Fri­day. Richard Ruvo, sec­tion chief in New York for the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Admin­is­tra­tion, said: “Today is a very bad day.”

“When there’s more power demand, there’s more power plants run­ning, and there’s more pol­lu­tion. We’re see­ing ozone lev­els above unhealthy lev­els in the entire North­east and Mid­west, not just in the cities,” he said. “On days like today, the air qual­ity affects every­one, not just asth­mat­ics and the elderly.”

Lau­ren Nash, a mete­o­rol­o­gist with the National Weather Ser­vice, said the cities are expe­ri­enc­ing the “urban heat island” effect.

“All the con­crete and the black­top warms up faster, so it keeps the city hot­ter and it stays hot­ter longer,” she said. Overnight tem­per­a­tures did not get below 80 in some areas.

New York Deputy Mayor Stephen Gold­smith said, “The dan­ger isn’t just the heat, it’s also the heat under­ground. Much of our infra­struc­ture is below ground.”

“It’s good in tor­na­does, bad in heat,” he said.

Richard Karty, who teaches urban ecol­ogy at the New School in New York City, said, “If one urban area is next to another urban area, like New York and Newark, it’s just going to com­pound both the heat and the air pollution.”

Dayana Byrnes, 21, of Wal­dorf, Md., learned some­thing new about her­self as she worked out­doors in Wash­ing­ton to pro­mote a web­site with free bot­tled drinks.

“I didn’t think legs could sweat,” Byrnes said.

In Man­ches­ter, Conn., the fire depart­ment sent out a vehi­cle to dis­trib­ute cold water to road crews.

Horse races were can­celed at sev­eral tracks.

But hun­dreds of peo­ple who lined up out­side the Izod Cen­ter in Newark to audi­tion for NBC’s “The Voice” were unde­terred. And in Man­as­sas, Va., Civil War buffs said the weather — per­haps 20 degrees hot­ter than in 1861 — would not pre­vent a 150th-anniversary re-enactment of the Bat­tle of Bull Run.

George Alcox, 58, of Berea, Ohio, said the wool uni­forms and muslin under­gar­ments the re-enactors wear are “not as hot as they look.”

“They’re hot­ter,” he said.

Posted by AP News on Jul 22 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.