‘It’s just too hot’: Unrelenting sun scorches East Coast, with no respite from heat forecast

‘It’s just too hot’: East Coast scorched by heat

NEW YORK — It’s just no fun in the sun.

That was the conclusion in the streets of the Bronx as 14-year-old Miguel Pena and 13-year-old Vincent Quiles walked their bicycles up a hill on one of the hottest days in the past decade in the Northeast.

“Man, this stinks,” said Miguel, who, like his friend, was wearing a white handkerchief to keep the sweat out of his eyes. “We just got out of school, and this is supposed to be when we have fun, but this is too much. We thought it would be cooler on the bike, but now we’re going home. It’s just too hot.”

Vincent, feeling punished by the unrelenting sun and record-breaking 103-degree heat on Tuesday, chimed in: “You can’t breathe out here.”

And Wednesday didn’t seem likely to offer any relief, the National Weather Service said. It was forecast to be almost as hot as Tuesday and to be the most humid day of the stretch. Humidity, meteorologist Brian Ciemnecki explained, is the amount of moisture in the air, and high humidity is what makes people feel sticky and places seem stuffy.

Even though Wednesday’s high temperature was expected to be a few degrees lower, the heat index value, a measure of what it feels like outside determined by combining temperature and humidity, would hover around 100, Ciemnecki said.

“It’s still gonna be hot,” he cautioned.

The East Coast broiled Tuesday as record-setting temperatures soared past 100 from Virginia to Massachusetts, utility companies cranked up power to the limit to cool the sweating masses and railroad tracks were so hot commuter trains had to slow down. The temperature broke records for the day in New York, where it hit 103, and in Philadelphia, where it reached 102.

Construction worker Pat McHugh, his face shiny with sweat as he took a break in New York City, said it was brutal.

“Worst heat on the job in 10 years,” he said.

Deaths blamed on the heat included a 92-year-old Philadelphia woman whose body was found Monday and a homeless woman found lying next to a car Sunday in suburban Detroit.

It was also over 100 in cities from Richmond, Va., to Boston, and Providence, R.I., and Hartford, Conn., also set records, the National Weather Service said.

“It’s safe to say this is one of the hottest days in about a decade for many locations in the Northeast and even inland,” Weather Service spokesman Sean Potter said. “You’d go back to 2001 or maybe 1999 to find a similar heat wave.”

The record-breaking cities and other dense, built-up areas are getting hit with the heat in a way their counterparts in suburbs and rural areas aren’t. Cities absorb more solar energy during the day and are slower to release it at night.

Scientists have known for years about these so-called heat islands, urban areas that are hotter than the less-developed areas around them. They say cities, with their numerous building surfaces and paved roads and lack of vegetation, just aren’t well designed to release summertime heat.

With people cranking up the air conditioning Tuesday, energy officials said there was tremendous demand for electricity but the grid didn’t buckle. Usage appeared to be falling just short of records set throughout the Northeast during a major heat wave in 2006.

Meteorologists in some places began calling the current hot stretch a heat wave, defined in the Northeast as three consecutive days of temperatures of 90 or above. New Jersey’s largest city, Newark, handily beat that threshold, hitting 100 for the third day in a row. Temperatures throughout the Mid-Atlantic region were expected to be in the high 90s to 100 again on Wednesday.

The Suffolk County Red Cross, on New York’s Long Island, said it planned to hand out bottles of water to day laborers who gather on corners waiting for work, often manual labor on rooftops or in fields and yards.

It was so hot Tuesday that even machines had to slow down. Transportation officials cut the speed of commuter trains in suburban Washington, D.C., and New York when the tracks got too hot. Extreme heat can cause welded rails to bend under pressure. Some train service to New Jersey was canceled.

Workers at the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine, N.J., used tubs of ice cubes to help four sick or weakened seals keep cool.

It wasn’t much easier on animal lovers. In Massachusetts, Katie Wright was determined to follow through on her promise to take her children to a zoo.

“It’s pretty ridiculous,” Wright said as her 3-year-old son, Jackson, and 2-year-old daughter, Emery, watched owls and hawks at the Massachusetts Audubon’s Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary in Lincoln. “But we wanted to get out, so we brought hats, sunscreen, extra water and then promised the kids lunch at an air-conditioned restaurant.”

In Newark, people took advantage of pools and cooling centers.

Cierra Christmas and Ayana Welch, both 11, were cooling off in sprinklers at the Rotunda Recreation Center pool as part of a summer camp program.

“I would say, it seems like I’m in an oven and it’s on 360 and I’m being baked like a cake,” Cierra said.

Ayana laughed, adding, “360? I’m at 550!”

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Eva Dou, Verena Dobnik, Deepti Hajela and Colleen Long in New York; Jeff McMillan and JoAnn Loviglio in Philadelphia; Geoff Mulvihill in Haddonfield, N.J.; Mark Pratt in Lincoln, Mass.; and Lauren Sausser in Washington.