Midwest can’t get any relief from heat

Associated Press

DETROIT

When the air conditioner stopped in Ashley Jackson’s Southfield, Mich., home, so too did normal conversations and nightly rest.

“Inside the house, it was 91 degrees. ... I wasn’t talking to anybody. Nobody was talking to anybody,” said Jackson, 23, who works as a short- order cook in Detroit. “We mostly slept, but it was hard to sleep because of the heat. I probably got about four hours of sleep each night.”

St. Louis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Indianapolis and several other Midwest cities have broken heat records this week. And with even low temperatures setting record highs, some residents have no means of relief, day or night.

The National Weather Service said the record-breaking heat that has baked the nation’s midsection for several days was slowly moving into the mid-Atlantic states and Northeast. Excessive-heat warnings remained in place Friday for all of Iowa, Indiana and Illinois as well as much of Wisconsin, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Kentucky.

St. Louis hit a record high of 105 on Thursday and a record low of 83 — the second day in a row the city has broken records for both temperatures. Temperatures didn’t fall below 82 in Chicago, 78 in Milwaukee and 77 in Indianapolis.

In Chicago on Thursday, the Shedd Aquarium lost power as temperatures soared to 103 degrees, a record for July 5. Officials said emergency generators immediately kicked in, and the outage never threatened any of the animals, but several hundred visitors were sent back out into the heat.

Not even the setting of the sun brought respite as temperatures hovered around 90 degrees downtown at 10 p.m. Some visitors made their way to Millennium Park to splash in the park’s kid-friendly Crown Fountain.

Many cities have tried to help by opening cooling centers and extending the hours for their public pools. In some areas, recent storms have knocked out electricity; about 137,000 people in Michigan were without power Friday as temperatures moved steadily toward the 100-degree mark.

Lack of electricity also is likely to compound the misery for many in the storm-ravaged East as the dangerous temperatures move in.