Las Vegas set a new record on Wednesday as it marked a fifth consecutive day over 115F (46C), amid a lingering hot spell that will continue scorching much of the US into the weekend.
The blazing hot temperatures climbed to 115F shortly after 1pm at Harry Reid international airport, breaking the old mark of four consecutive days above 115F set in July 2005.
The brutal milestone marks yet another record for the Nevada desert city this week: on Sunday, Las Vegas hit an all-time high of 120F (48.8C). Even by desert standards, the prolonged baking the city is experiencing is nearly unprecedented.
“This is the most extreme heatwave in the history of record-keeping in Las Vegas since 1937,” said meteorologist John Adair, a veteran of three decades at the National Weather Service office in southern Nevada.
Keith Bailey and Lee Doss met early Wednesday morning at Las Vegas park to beat the heat and exercise their dogs, Breakie, Ollie and Stanley.
“If I don’t get out by 8.30 in the morning, then it’s not going to happen that day,” Bailey said, wearing a sunhat while the dogs played in the grass.
Alyse Sobosan said this July has been the hottest in the 15 years she has lived in Las Vegas. She said she doesn’t step outside during the day if she can help it, and she waits until 9pm or later to walk her dogs.
“It’s oppressively hot,” she said. “It’s like you can’t really live your life.”
The extended heatwave comes with serious dangers, health officials have emphasized.
“Even people of average age who are seemingly healthy can suffer heat illness when it’s so hot it’s hard for your body to cool down,” said Alexis Brignola, an epidemiologist at the Southern Nevada Health District.
While hotels and casinos kept visitors cool with giant AC units, the scorching heat presented acute danger for homeless residents and others without access to safe environments.
Officials have set up emergency cooling centers at community centers across southern Nevada. Firefighters in Henderson, Nevada, last week became the first in the region to deploy what city spokesperson Madeleine Skains called “polar pods”.
The pods, first deployed in Phoenix, can be filled with water and ice to immerse a medical patient in cold water on the way to a hospital.
The intense heatwave hitting Vegas has been searing much of the US west in recent days, with several places setting heat records and reporting fatalities.
In Oregon, the city of Portland saw record daily temperatures on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and Salem set a new record, hitting 103F on Sunday. The excessive temperatures are suspected to have caused at least eight deaths in the state, the state medical examiner’s office said on Tuesday.
In California, the heat was blamed for a motorcyclist’s death in the Death Valley national park. Death Valley is considered one of the most extreme environments in the world. The hottest temperature ever officially recorded on Earth was 134F in July 1913 in Death Valley, though some experts dispute that measurement and say the real record was 130F, recorded there in July 2021.
On Tuesday, tourists visiting the park queued for photos in front of a giant thermometer that was reading 120F.
Phoenix, Arizona, which has averaged the hottest temperature ever for the first eight days of July in records dating to 1885, tied the daily record on Tuesday of 116F set in 1958. Triple-digit temperatures were also recorded in Idaho.
Reno, Nevada, broke its daily record with 104F on Tuesday, and was suffering through the longest streak ever of days hitting 105F or higher. Before this week, the city – at an elevation of 4,500 ft (1,372 meters) – had never been that hot for more than two consecutive days in records dating to 1888.
On the other side of the country, the east coast was also facing extreme heat. An excessive heat warning remained in place Wednesday for the Philadelphia area, northern Delaware and nearly all of New Jersey, where temperatures hovered around 90F (32C) for most the region.
The US heatwave comes as the global temperature in June set a record for the 13th straight month and marked the 12th straight month that the world was 1.5C (2.7FF) warmer than pre-industrial times, the European climate service Copernicus said. Most of this heat, trapped by the human-caused climate crisis, is from long-term warming from greenhouse gases emitted by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, scientists say.
Extreme heat is exacerbating the threat of wildfires across the US west, where a longstanding drought has dried out vegetation that fuels the blazes.
A new fire in Oregon, dubbed the Larch Creek fire, quickly grew to more than 5 sq miles (12 sq km) on Tuesday evening as flames tore through grassland in Wasco county. Evacuations were ordered for remote homes about 15 miles (24km) south of the Dalles.
In California, firefighters were battling least 18 wildfires Tuesday, including a 42-sq-mile blaze that prompted evacuation orders for about 200 residences in the mountains of Santa Barbara county.
That blaze, called the Lake fire, was only 16% contained, and forecasters warned of a “volatile combination” of high heat, low humidity and north-west winds developing late in the day.
And north-east of Los Angeles, the 2-sq-mile Vista fire chewed through trees in the San Bernardino national forest and sent up a huge plume of smoke visible across the region.
The National Weather Service said it was extending the excessive heat warnings across most of the south-west US through Saturday morning.
“It’s not over yet,” the service in Reno said.
