The National Weather Service warned of an “extremely hot and dangerous weekend,” with daytime highs routinely ranging between 10 and 20 degrees Fahrenheit above normal in the US West.
Residents of central and southern California, for example, saw thermometers peaking at 105 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit (41 to 43 degrees Celsius), it said.
By Saturday afternoon, California’s famous Death Valley, one of the hottest places on Earth, had reached a sizzling 51 degrees Celsius, with Sunday’s peak predicted to soar as high as 54°C. Even overnight lows there could exceed 38°C.
The heat is forecast to remain anchored over the West for the weekend, “growing hotter in the South by early next week.”
Authorities have been sounding the alarm for days, advising people to avoid outdoor activities in the daytime and to be on the watch for signs of dehydration, which can quickly become fatal in such temperatures.
In Arizona, the state capital of Phoenix has recorded 16 straight days above 43°C, as temperatures hit 47°C Saturday afternoon – while the NWS predicted they could reach a record-breaking 47.8°C by the end of the day.
According to the NWS, Phoenix is ”likely to register its hottest week on record by 7-day temperature average.”
The city has organized volunteers to direct residents to cooling centers and distribute bottles of water and hats, but program head David Hondula told the local ABC station that its three-days-per-week schedule is “clearly… not enough” as the heat intensifies.
The NWS warned Saturday that “heat is the leading weather-related killer in the US” and to take the risk “seriously.”
At a construction site outside Houston, a 28-year-old worker who gave his name only as Juan helped complete a wall in the blazing heat.
“Just when I take a drink of water, I get dizzy, I want to vomit because of the heat,” he told AFP. “I need something else, a Coca-Cola, a Gatorade – and cold – just to be able to keep going.”
Residents of the Texas metropolis have been asked to conserve energy from 2 to 10 pm Saturday through Monday by provider Reliant Energy, in an attempt to mitigate high demand.
Further west, the Texas border city of El Paso marked its 30th consecutive day of temperatures reaching or topping 38°C on Saturday.
‘Not typical’
Heat waves are occurring more often and more intensely in major cities across the United States, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, with a frequency of six per year during the 2010s and 2020s compared to two per year during the 1960s.
“This heat wave is NOT typical desert heat,” the National Weather Service’s Las Vegas branch tweeted, specifying that “its long duration, extreme daytime temperatures, & warm nights” were unusual.
In Canada, which is suffering from warm temperatures combined with months of below-average rainfall, the amount of land burned by devastating wildfires climbed to an-all time high of 24.7 million acres (10 million hectares) so far this year on Saturday.
“We find ourselves this year with figures that are worse than our most pessimistic scenarios,” Yan Boulanger, a researcher at Canada’s natural resources ministry, told AFP.
Smoke from the wildfires was meanwhile creating unhealthy air quality conditions in parts of the upper-central United States, similar to episodes in June when Canadian blazes cloaked the US East Coast in a noxious haze.
While it can be hard to attribute a particular weather event to climate change, scientists insist that global warming – linked to humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels — is responsible for the multiplication and intensification of heat waves in the world.
The US heat wave comes after the EU’s climate-monitoring service said the planet saw its hottest June on record last month.
