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Heat Wave to Hit Two-Thirds of the U.S. Here’s What to Expect.
Dangerously hot temperatures are expected to spread across the Central and Eastern United States on Wednesday through the weekend, with temperatures soaring above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the hardest-hit places, the National Weather Service has warned.
And even when the sun dips below the horizon, temperatures in many places are expected to remain in the 80s.
The hottest part of the country? Smack dab in the middle.
Everyone living in the region stretching from northern Oklahoma and central Nebraska through Iowa, Missouri and western Illinois should brace for a “prolonged period of dangerously hot temperatures and high humidity,” the warnings say. People in central and south central Kansas should expect to endure highs of about 102 degrees; the temperature in Des Moines was expected to hover around 100.
Excessive heat warnings have also been posted farther east, for parts of New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania.
All told, at least 15 million people across the United States are currently being warned of dangerously high temperatures that could affect human health between Wednesday and Friday.
By the weekend, what meteorologists are calling a “heat dome” in the middle part of the country is expected to spread into the Great Lakes and the East Coast.
Extreme heat can kill. Here’s what you can do to stay safe.
“The combination of heat and humidity can take its toll on someone who is outside and overdoing it,” said Richard Bann, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center. “It can be life-threatening.”
Last year, 108 people died from extreme heat, compared to just 30 who died from cold, according to statistics on weather-related fatalities released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Here are four safety recommendations from the National Weather Service:
Drink plenty of fluids.
Stay in an air-conditioned room.
Stay out of the sun.
Check on relatives and neighbors, especially the elderly.
(Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday July 18 2019, @01:15PM (4 children)
Headline over on TechDirt: 5G's Latest Problem: Summer Temps Are Causing 5G Phones To Overheat
My thought: can't they replace those temps with regular employees?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Thursday July 18 2019, @01:32PM (3 children)
Other tech related news, some cablemodem outside plant hardware dislikes large temp variations, partially amps and stuff and only temp compensated over limited ranges, partially because some hardline is made of aluminum and copper and differential expansion of a hundred feet causes all kinds of hilarity. There's interesting technology to work around differential expansion and it works great when tediously installed properly, but "F it I'm late" during good weather means its often not installed properly and only works fine over a limited temp range.
More heat related tech news would include at multiple past utilities this weather would induce safe mode on the outside plant techs so never be out of sight of another tech (in case of heatstroke, etc) and take extra long breaks between assigned tasks in air conditioning, so productivity drops by a factor of three or four making it take a long time to fix "normal" workloads. Of course the temps mean the workload might be higher resulting in massive long outages for not terribly interesting reasons.
Some telco facilities have borderline cooling due to lack of maint and you can expect some overheating shutdowns on the hottest day in awhile.
Watching brownouts affect datacenters will be interesting. Where I live, industrial transfer switches for telco-scale UPS systems are far less reliable than AC power, so expect some dead xfer switches this weekend across the country. The most "funny" one I was personally involved in was a xfer switch that snapped to generator when a brownout happened, then the dirty contacts welded themselves to generator, tried to switch back to commercial power, failed because it was welded, power down the generator, whoopsies that was a major outage...
A pity the clickbait sites don't have any actual tech reporting about heatwaves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday July 19 2019, @03:38AM (2 children)
Sounds like workers need some kind of vital sign / motion monitoring system that would alert other employees if someone seems overtemp, tachycardic, hyperventilating, low O2 sat, disabled, etc.
Interesting about the xfer switch. Somehow the big-picture got ignored in the thinking there. Keeping power on was not the priority I guess. Contact welding is a known issue, and you'd think they'd do something to pry them apart or something. Maybe contacts for reliability / safety, and some big triacs to save the contacts.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday July 19 2019, @02:51PM (1 child)
Eh, HIPPA stuff...
Yeah I donno the innards of xfer switches but I do know that in a civilized area far away from coasts where we don't have brownouts and blackouts, buried service is essentially uninterruptible and xfer switches are in practice vastly less reliable than outlet power. Yet if there is ever an outlet failure its unacceptable to not have a generator. So customers demand less reliable power, just kinda how it is, LOL.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday July 19 2019, @03:18PM
> Eh, HIPPA stuff...
Break-ins / leaks are only a matter of time.