Thought yesterday was hot? Well, you ain’t felt nothing yet!
Temperatures that hit the mid-90s yesterday were just a prelude to what might reach triple digits today.
“It’s going to be in the high 90s, but if you factor in the humidity it’ll feel more like 105 or 110 degrees,” said AccuWeather meteorologist Alex Sosnowski. “Late afternoon, that’ll be the worst of it.”
Tomorrow will be icky again, but with the mercury “dipping” into the mid-90s, according to Sosnowski.
Cooler temperatures will break late tomorrow or Thursday morning as thunderstorms roll in.
Con Edison had extra crews on alert yesterday with only two minor outages – one on the East Side and the other in The Bronx. The city opened 290 cooling centers to combat the hottest day since last summer’s deadly heat wave.
The 2006 heat wave that struck in late July and early August caused 40 deaths from heat stroke and contributed to the deaths of another 60 people, city health officials said.
Yesterday, EMS responded to a dozen heat-related reports.
“I don’t care how good a runner you are, I don’t care how strong you are, you should take some precautions to prevent strokes,” Mayor Bloomberg said.
In Midtown yesterday, Egyptian-born hot-dog vendor Ashua Shabib, 33, said he was keeping cool by using a planter’s spray gun to spritz himself occasionally.
“Ninety percent of vendors come from countries hotter than America, so this is not bad for us,” he said.
Yesterday at Grand Army Plaza Park in Brooklyn, Meredith Apel, 33, took a break from shopping for a new air conditioner and dipped her toes in the fountain.
“I have the fans on and when I get back home, I’m going to take a cold shower,” she said.
Alexis Kraft, 41, an architect in Park Slope, was decked out in shorts and sandals.
“I don’t have any air conditioning in my studio, so I had to find the coolest thing to put on,” he said as he headed to a meeting.