Results tagged “heatwave”

A is for Ana, heading for the DR. B is for Bill, staying out to sea. C is for Claudette, making the south wet. After a slow start the Atlantic hurricane season hopped to life over the weekend with three named storms. The strongest, Hurricane Bill, looks like it will stay out to sea. The lady storms would have the potential to drop some rain our way were it not for the appearance of another stranger this summer.

Cool, cloudy weather got you down this week? Fear not; what passes for an April heat wave will be here for the weekend. Why? The Bermuda High is making its first northward foray of the season, bringing July-like warmth to much of the East Coast.

Do you know what yesterday, today and tomorrow have in common? Statistically speaking, they are the hottest days of the year, averaging 85 for a high and 70 for a low. In that sense the recent hot spell peaked just about on time. Although the heat advisory is still in effect, today shouldn't be as warm as the weekend as the temperature will probably top out around 90. There's a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms this afternoon. Tomorrow will be very similar, very warm with a chance of showers.

Hot enough for ya? The NY Times has a cheap, easy solution for cooling off: the heat wave haircut! The paper calls summer "scalping season" and says that barbershops have been flooded as the temperatures have been rising -- with men shaving off their entire head of hair, beards included. They say "half measures are no longer sufficient" and the phrase "a little off the top" has gone out the window. One barber estimated that on a hot day 15 to 25 folks come in for the $14 "zero cut," which is pretty self-explanatory. Even women are joining in, as one shop noted the fairer sex had been coming in for a "Sinead O'Connor" to help them cope with the heat and humidity.

Today is going to be downright unpleasant and tomorrow even worse. A big high pressure system off the Mid-Atlantic coast is pulling hot and humid air into the region. Look for highs this afternoon in the mid 90s in the city and lower 90s in the suburbs. The heat and humidity have set off a heat advisory as well as an air quality alert. In response to the heat the city has opened cooling centers and the Salvation Army is opening their community centers to help people keep cool.

The NYC Medical Examiner's office says six residents died from the heat wave which saw temperatures soar to record-breaking levels in high humidity. The victims all died of hyperthermia (aka heat stroke)-- 57-year-old man, 74-year-old woman, and 84-year-old man in Brooklyn; a 70-year-old woman, an 84-year-old woman, and an 89-year-old man in Queens--and five of them died on Tuesday, the hottest day, in their homes. (Back in 2006, there were 20-23 heat wave-related deaths.)

The heat is on all across the Eastern Seaboard, and temperatures in New York City reached 96 degrees yesterday (just missing a record)--and it felt like even more with its densely-packed buildings and people. There were scattered power outages: Outages for 1,400 customers were reported by Con Ed, 788 by Long Island Power Authority (which had thousands on Monday), and 75,700 by PSE&G in NJ's Essex County.

Bring on the baked Big Apple references, because the "heat advisory" for Bronx, Kings, New York, Queens, Richmond Counties remains in effect until 6 p.m. tonight. Another one will go into effect tomorrow between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m.

Enjoy the cool weather today as tomorrow is likely to be twenty degrees warmer. The fog and clouds this morning are typical precursors to the passage of a warm front. This particular front has some mighty hot air behind it. Today's high will be in the mid-70s. The sun may make an appearance after noon. Tomorrow is going to be hot. Look for a near-record high in the mid 90s.

Bar Boulud: Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni recently lost his patience waiting on hold for 15 minutes to make a reservation, which should give you some sense of how feverish the excitement is for Daniel Boulud’s latest foray. The tony uptown wine bar, across the street from Lincoln Center, enjoyed the raging buzz of a sneak-preview opening on New Year’s Eve and now the 100 seat restaurant is open for real. Judging from the photos, the modern yet warm interior does look inviting; a long vaulted ceiling is intended to “invoke a classic wine cellar”, a backlit gravel wall echoes an old world vineyard, and three private “wine themed” dining rooms are available for the swells.

READING: Dave Eggers has delivered two (out of three) great novels, and tonight he reads from last one (which is just out on paperback), What is the What. He'll be at the Strand discussing the book and he'll also give a slideshow presentation from a recent trip he took to Sudan. More info here. Friday // 7pm // Strand Bookstore [828 Broadway] // Free EVENT: We love a good pillow fight, and tonight there's a...

Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse.

There are a lot of obscure weather and climate statistics and records. Two of Gothamist's favorites are the record low high temperature and the record high low temperature. Yesterday we had one of the former. The combination of being in a cold air mass and under heavy cloud cover also tied 1911 (WCBS didn't give the exact date) as having the lowest high temperature of any day in August.

This afternoon's temperature has been bouncing up and down as the sun struggles to come out behind the cruddy clouds. This morning's clouds were leftover from a bit of convective activity to our south last night. A line of showers is approaching the city from the west. Some of those showers may be intense, as they hit the city later this afternoon and into the evening.

That wasn't much of a heat wave, was it? Two straight days with a high of 92 degrees barely rates mentioning. By comparision, the longest stretch of 90 degree days recorded in Central Park was 12 in 1953. More recently, in July and August 2002, there was a 22-day stretch in which the high reached at least 90 on 17 of those days.

Over the past few days the storm off the coast has been the Fugazi of weather systems. It's been doing its own thing, shooting spokes of clouds and rain over New York and New England, completely independent of the world of weather circulating around it. Over the next day or two, however, it appears that the low will get ambushed and be incorporated into the mainstream atmospheric circulation.

With autumn in full swing and the weather continuing to cool, it’s easy to forget just how scorching and unbearably hot this last summer was at times. Between Starbucks’ quickly rescinded free drink offer and the multiple “cooling” centers set up around the city, the whole time seems like a convenient blur now.

NY1 seems to have taken Labor Day off when it comes to today's weather. Ah, well, Gothamist will try to fill-in some of the blanks. Today will be a slightly warmer version of yesterday. In other words, nice enough to make up for Saturday's wetness. Look for mostly sunny skies and a high temperature approaching 80. Perfect for the West Indian Day parade!

If there's a heat wave, it seems that is takes weeks to figure out who has died from it, as the city has raised the number of heat wave-related deaths to 36. Three more deaths caused by the heat wave earlier this month were confirmed by the ME's office: An 82 year old mother and her 47 year old son from Brooklyn and a 46 year old man in the Bronx. Between August 10 and now, ten more deaths were attributed to the heat wave, and investigations are still ongoing. What's sad is that the deaths seem to afflict the elderly and disabled.)

The regulatory agency that oversees utilities in NY State, the Public Service Commission has been holding holding public hearings about the Queens blackout. The only thing is that the meetings have drawn very few attendees - those ones who did make it made sure to yell things like "This is a disgrace!" The NY Times reports that the hearings aren't providing any answers to angry and confused customers. Well, clearly the hearings are just the Public Service Commission's way of going through the motions as it compiles a report. And it's also depressing, because it seems that Mayor Bloomberg did lowball the city's energy's needs, according to a Crain's New York Business article.

With the weather as perfect as it was last night, it’s pretty easy to forget about the excessive heat and humidity that consumed the country last week. But as the city’s medical examiners continue to perform autopsies on New Yorkers who died last week, we’re finding that the death count from the heat wave continues to climb with more than 10 deaths being added to the list since Friday. An 80-year-old Queens woman and a 60-year-old Bronx man are just the latest who succumbed to hyperthermia in the days that were so hot that Bloomie had to declare a city emergency. They bring the total death count to 26, with 13 in Queens, one in the Bronx, four in Manhattan, and eight in Brooklyn. While some City dwellers were just without air conditioning, some had chronic medical conditions that made them particularly susceptible to the temperature and couldn’t get out of their apartments to get to a public cooling center. But sometimes it’s not entirely possible to find out if a death was caused by the heat, probably leading to an underestimation of the actual death toll. A trick to help sort out the mess is to figure out how many deaths normally occur during that time of year and counting the excess.

As we appreciate the fact that last week's heat wave was last week, the NY Times' Sewell Chan has an article about that the little-known fact that turned-off appliances that are still plugged-in still draw electricity. We mentioned the "standby mode" issue last week, noting that is why Con Ed asks people to actually unplug TVs, printers, computers, and the like when the power demand is high. (It probably isn't a bad idea to unplug them at other times, too.) Many people interviewed were surprised, saying they would have unplugged their various gadget chargers or shut down their computers, with one woman commenting, "The laptop is always connected to the source. I didn’t know that made a difference.” Well, it makes some difference - the Consumer Electronics Association spokesman says that gadgets don't compare to the electricity air-conditioining or lighting sucks out of the system. Which makes us wonder if you've changed your electrical consumption habits? Gothamist thinks we're going to be a little more cautious these days - we know that our little home might not represent much, but if other people unplug one more appliance or use a fan instead of AC during milder hot days, who knows what can happen?

Remember yesterday when we thought the body-count for last weeks heat wave was at 10-13 people? Yeah, scratch that. Coroners for the City are now upping that number by ten to 20-23 deaths. The three-body spread is due to suspicious looking circumstances which the coroner is looking at extra closely before blaming on the high temperatures (a man in his 30s found under the Gowanus Expressway and a 82-year-old woman and her 47-year-old son found dead in their beds in Brooklyn). Of the ten people added to the heat-waves death toll 2 lived in Brooklyn and 8 lived in Queens, though none of them lived in the areas affected by all the blackouts. Six of the victims were women, four were men, and they ranged in age from 52 to 99 years old.

Well, the heat wave is past, the dead are being counted, and so it is now time for the city's papers to fill up their first-Saturday-in-August issues with newsprint on the aftermath and what could've gone worse. So let's just go with that old-blog-standard, the roundup:

With the recent heat wave broken the city has now begun the unenviable task of counting bodies. And the news isn't so swell: As many as 13 New Yorkers may have had their lives cut short by the recent oppressive heat, though as of this morning the City was keeping the count at 10. Six of the dead lived in Brooklyn and the other four lived in Manhattan. The victims ranged in age from 42 to 86, and their deaths are mostly being blamed on tightly sealed apartments with poor ventilation and/or no AC. Such conditions can easily lead to advanced heat stroke, or hyperthermia. Further out on Long Island at least two other people were felled by the high temperatures.

Yesterday was the third day of the August heat wave, but the sprinkling of rain in the early evening and cooler weather today and the weekend should hopefully bring relief to us all. And it looks like Con Ed managed to avoid a bigger blackout when feeder cables on the East Side failed and manholes exploded in the area as well; of course, Con Ed sending its own non-essential employees home certainly freaked everyone out! Bigger institutions, from hospitals to universities and performing venues - even the Bronx Zoo - switched to generators for power in order to conserve energy. However, some areas, such as in the Bronx, have been without power for days. Mayor Bloomberg is asking us to continue to conserve energy.

With the mercury rising to high for the city's liking, Mayor Bloomberg held a press conference at the Office of Emergency Operations in Brooklyn to emphasize what the city is doing during the heat wave. We suspect he's trying to be extra visible and genially authoritative (check out the plaid shirt!) in order to salvage public opinion after the Queens blackout, but his words are important:

“The heat wave affects New Yorkers in all five boroughs, and that’s why the City is aggressively moving to protect New Yorkers from Tottenville to Co-Op City from this week’s oppressive heat and promote energy conservation. Hundreds of people have already tragically passed away due to the heat wave in other parts of the country, and I urge New Yorkers – especially seniors – to take the danger of high temperatures and humidity seriously. You can beat the heat by drinking plenty of water, staying out of the sun, avoiding strenuous activity, and taking advantage of City cooling centers and public pools. The City is also actively taking large energy users such as wastewater treatment plants off the grid and conserving energy at City buildings across the five boroughs to help cope with the increased demands on the electrical grid.”

It's pretty hot out there, eh? Actually, in Brooklyn it isn't too bad right now. At least if you can catch a breeze in the shade. Which is our way of leading into the sort of good news that as of yesterday afternoon (the first day of the heat wave we're just settling into) ConEd had only "only 139 customers without power — 93 in Queens, 22 in Westchester, 19 in Staten Island, 3 in the Bronx and 1 each in Manhattan and Brooklyn"

- Finally, napping kittens the size of your hand make for really, really cute videos.

A very interesting NY Sun story about the future of the "Honest Boy" fruit stand at the southeast corner of Broadway and Houston. Many people, including Gothamist, love the stand for fresh fruit at all times ($2 for a container of delicious, refreshing watermelon!), and now, Honest Boy's owner Pan Gi Lee and the MTA are meeting with the Landmarks Preservation Commission to propose turning the old stand into a "two-story glass, steel, and aluminum building." The Sun notes that the LPC had to be involved, because it's in a historic district, but this seems to follow the city's plans to glass-and-steel up newsstands and bus shelters. But some people are worried it'll become charmless. The Sun also has a little bit on the history of the corner:

The MTA owns the land — about 1,000 square feet — and leases it to Mr. Lee. The agency has encouraged the proprietor to fix up the place, according to [architect Tobias] Guggenheimer [who designed the proposed new design] and a source at the MTA.

Continue reading "MTA Wants to Make Fruit Stand "Honest""