Around the Las Vegas area this week, pedestrians sometimes felt scarcer than jackpots. Playgrounds stood empty and silent. Merely walking through a parking lot meant squinting — not at the sunlight blanketing the region, but at a heat so punishing that eyes hurt without ever actually watering.
At times, the mercury’s ticks upward have come so fast that forecasters, at once awe-struck and unnerved, could hardly keep up.
“Remember 20 minutes ago when hitting 47°C was a big deal?” the local National Weather Service office wrote on social media Wednesday. “Well, the airport hit 47.7°C.”
Thursday was not shaping up to be much of a reprieve at all.
More than 60 million Americans were under heat alerts from the National Weather Service on Thursday as a searing heat wave that has engulfed the West for more than a week continued to blister the region. Dangerously high temperatures are forecast to last there through Saturday and shift east to the central and eastern US by Sunday.
Across the West, large parts of California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah were under excessive heat warnings, indicating “extremely dangerous heat conditions”. Officials believe heat may be to blame for more than 90 deaths reported in the West this month, though it could take months of investigations for authorities to determine an accurate death toll.
More than a dozen high-temperature records were expected to fall, from the West Coast to the High Plains, where temperatures will soar. Some places in the deserts and valleys of California, Arizona and Nevada will once again hit the 43s and 48s Celsius.
The Las Vegas Valley, home to about 2.3 million people, is under an excessive heat warning that runs until Friday night. Wednesday was the fifth straight day that the daytime high reached or exceeded 46°C, a record.
“Right now, it’s just a matter of getting inside, being smart as far as hydrating yourself, and just living your life as well as you can,” said Oscar Goodman, who moved to Las Vegas in 1964 and later served as mayor for 12 years before he relinquished the job to his wife.
New York Times News Service
