East Coast states brace for yet another scorcher

[July 07, 2010]  PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Heat and humidity draped the Northeast for yet another day Wednesday, pushing power companies to crank up power to cool the sticky masses and keeping the mercury hovering around 100 from Virginia to New Hampshire.

The crux of the heat was situated over the Philadelphia area, where an excessive heat warning was put into effect until 8 p.m. The National Weather Service said high humidity levels could make it feel as hot as Tuesday.

It was already 71 degrees, hazy and humid before 7 a.m. at a golf course in suburban Albany, N.Y., where gardener Sarah Breglia was bracing for another sweltering work day. She said her strategy for getting through the day was to drink lots of fluids and place bottled water at several locations around the Guilderland golf course.

"I try to stay in the shade in the afternoon," she said. "We do all the areas in the sun, all the sweeping, cleaning up, as early as possible. In the afternoon, we try to keep it cool."

Scattered power outages have affected customers up and down the coast and usage approaches record levels. In the Washington, D.C., area, nearly 2,000 customers were without power Wednesday, while New Jersey's largest utility, Public Service Electric & Gas, reported about 6,500 customers without electricity. Consolidated Edison in New York said it was working to restore power to about 6,300 customers, down from outages to 18,700 customers Tuesday.

Tatiana Solis, 17, was getting ready to deliver newspapers Wednesday in New York City, where forecasters predicted a high of up to 99 degrees.

The hot weather has made her work difficult.

"I have asthma and when it's hot, it's too exhausting," she said. "I can't breathe."

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.

Rail riders in New Jersey were advised to expect delays again Wednesday.

In Boston, the sweltering temperatures pushed a window washing company to adjust its hours to prevent employees from working during the hottest part of the day.

Victor Cruz, 24, usually starts his day with Cliffhangers Inc. at 6:45 a.m. But on Wednesday, he was washing ground floor doors and windows at Boston's Intercontinental Hotel starting at 4 a.m., so his day would end at noon, instead of 3:30 p.m.

"It's just exhausting," Cruz said, pining for the days he used to work in an air-conditioned bank. "I actually took Tuesday off because it was just too hot. When it's like this we'll sit in the van every so often with the air conditioner on for a few minutes just to cool down."

Tuesday's hot weather broke records for the day in New York, where it hit 103, and in Philadelphia, where it reached 102.

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.

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 Wednesday.

[Associated Press; By JOANN LOVIGLIO]

Associated Press writers Mark Pratt in Boston, Eva Dou in New York and Michael Hill in Albany, N.Y., contributed to this report.

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