From the New York Times, July 18, 2003:
Records Fall as Phoenix All but Redefines the Heat Wave
By NICK MADIGAN
PHOENIX, July 18 — When the sun shines all year long, as it does here, a heat wave is a heat wave only if things get really toasted.
This week, the toast has burned to a crisp.
On Monday, the temperature here soared to 116 degrees, a record for the date. Overnight into Tuesday morning, it dropped to only 96 degrees, making that the hottest night in Phoenix history. On Wednesday, the high was 117, the hottest of the year so far and one degree short of the city's record for that date, set in 1925. There has been more of the same since.
If, as forecast, temperatures remain at current levels — the average high so far this month is 111 degrees — Phoenix will be on track to record its hottest July since the onset of record-keeping here in 1895.
So how hot was it this week? It was so hot that rubber flip-flop sandals stuck to the asphalt at street crossings. It was so hot that a woman who fainted and fell face first on a sidewalk was rushed to a burn unit, her skin scalded by the searing pavement. It was so hot that planes coming in to land at Sky Harbor International Airport were buffeted by turbulence, a result, a pilot said, of heat rising from the desert floor.
"It does get a little warm," Bob Cummings, a Cincinnati native who retired in Phoenix two years ago, said with the understatement of someone who is simply too hot for hyperbole.
In such conditions, when heat hovers like a dull ache, Phoenix residents go outside as little as possible and walk slowly when they do, mindful that exertion just creates more heat. "A lot of people don't leave their houses," said Tara Hixson, 24, who was working the counter at a Häagen-Dazs ice cream store and so had little choice in the matter. "It's our winter: everyone stays shut in."
That could have accounted for the dearth of customers not only at the ice cream store, where you might well have expected throngs, but also in the rest of Biltmore Fashion Park, an outdoor shopping mall. Ms. Hixson, who moved here from Rapid City, S.D., four years ago, said she had grown accustomed to the oppressive summers, to the extent that anyone can. "It still hits you like a ton of bricks," she said. "The comfort is that for nine months of the year, it's gorgeous."
The highest temperature ever recorded in Phoenix was 122 degrees, on June 26, 1990. The city averages about 90 days of 100-plus temperatures a year. When the real heat hits, the comforts of air-conditioning can require a premium. The systems in at least five restaurants broke down this week, presumably overtaxed, prompting some repairmen to demand outlandish prices to fix them. Some homeowners got the same treatment. "My A.C. breaks every summer," said Brian Raab, a 27-year-old bartender, "but usually it's $250 to fix it; this time it was $700."
At the Santa Fe Court apartment complex in Tempe, a Phoenix suburb, tenants lost all air-conditioning on Sunday evening and enjoyed little respite throughout the week. Some did check into hotels, demanding refunds of their rent. But others had to make do with sleeping on wet sheets, electric fans blowing on them.
One resident there, Jose Antonio Rodriguez Cordoba, a prep cook in a restaurant, said he had sent his two boys, ages 7 and 9, to stay with an uncle of theirs who was blessed with air-conditioning. As he spoke, his two girls, 1 and 4, slept fitfully on a couch, a humming water-filled air cooler pointed at them. "My children have been crying; they're drowning in this heat," Mr. Rodriguez said. "The minute I get my paycheck, I'm checking into a hotel."
Marie Dozier, another tenant at the complex, said it was so hot at 4 a.m. on Thursday that she drenched her dog and three cats in the bathtub and took a swim in the pool.
"It's been terrible," said Ms. Dozier, who was told that the landlord was awaiting delivery of a part before the air-conditioning could be repaired. (A woman who answered the phone at the landlord's office today said the system would be fixed by day's end.)
To be sure, the heat here this week remained a few notches shy of that in notoriously blistering Death Valley, Calif., where on Tuesday the temperature reached 125 degrees. The National Weather Service attributes the unusually high temperatures in the Southwestern deserts to a strong and lingering high-pressure system. In this city in the aptly named Valley of the Sun, the heat is trapped and built up all day by the mass of asphalt, concrete, glass and metal, and takes far longer to be released than in the vast desert beyond Phoenix's boundaries.
Add to that the exhaust of vehicles, the effluence of industrial plants, the occasional sandstorm and the smoke drifting in from some of Arizona's routine summer wildfires, and the air, already stifling, can be almost unbearable.
"It's like a heater blowing outside," Ray Moreno, an attendant at a rental-car counter at Sky Harbor International Airport, said on Wednesday. "A huge dust storm blew in here last night. It lasted for maybe 20 minutes. At one point, the whole baggage area here was full of dust."
Even Phoenix's more moderate heat is approached with caution by people here, many of them transplants from elsewhere.
"This being a transitory town, they say you need five summers under your belt until you get used to the climate," said Laird Palmer, 48, who moved here from Chicago more than eight years ago. "Either way, you've got to watch out. This sun will dry you right up."
Dr. Paul A. Blackburn, who trains emergency doctors at Maricopa Medical Center, agreed, in layman's terms. "We joke that it's dry heat, but so is an oven," he said.
Dr. Blackburn said the hospital had lately been treating more people than usual for hyperthermia, or heat exposure. Two of them died this week, although in both cases, he said, their condition was complicated by drug or alcohol abuse. Most of those treated had body temperatures of around 104 degrees, some higher.
"I haven't seen this much of a cluster of extreme hyperthermia before," Dr. Blackburn said. "It may just be a coincidence, but it's hotter this year than it has been in some time."
As Charles Tuchinda, a 28-year-old tourist from Maryland, set off on Thursday morning for a two-mile hike on Camelback Mountain, a few miles northeast of downtown, he checked the temperature reading on his watch. It was 101.5 degrees in the shade, it said, and it was not yet 10 a.m.
"It's O.K. so far," Mr. Tuchinda said, hoisting a bottle of water to his lips and surveying the parched trail. "But it's definitely hotter than Baltimore."
Here's the name of the other one:
Respectfully, it should be the other way around.....your high temps in Phoenix are at least 10°F more than ours.
