Storm Loosens Grip of Deadly Heat Wave

An afternoon cloudburst was the talk of Dallas on Tuesday, ending a weeklong heat wave that produced blast furnace conditions unusual even by Texas standards. The unrelenting heat had broken or tied numerous records while claiming the lives of as many as 16, mostly elderly, people in north Texas and Oklahoma.

A number of the victims had air conditioners that either did not work or that they could not afford to operate.

In Dallas, Verna Bownds’ family said they had begged the 77-year-old woman to use her air conditioning. Concerned about her electric bill, she refused. Bownds was found dead last Thursday in her home, a victim of heatstroke. A fan whirred in the background but the air conditioning was turned off.

The misery extended into Oklahoma over the weekend, where temperatures soared into triple digits. Residents of Mannford, west of Tulsa, endured 116-degree temperatures on Saturday. Oklahoma City hit 110 degrees Sunday. “It was death around here, deadly hot,” said Paul Bos, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Norman, Okla.

For all its intensity, this year’s heat wave was not a total surprise. An early indication came in mid-February when, for several days, the mercury reached the mid-90s in north Texas. That was accompanied by an extended drought that left the Dallas-Fort Worth area with half of its normal rainfall and parched ground that had little cooling moisture to give back under the midday sun.

More recently, a large ridge of stagnant high pressure held hot, dry air captive while blocking cooling winds from the north.

The extreme heat tripled business at some Dallas-area air conditioner repair shops, drove sunbathers indoors and softened asphalt roads. A number of private water utilities ran dry during the heat wave, and electric companies scrambled to meet demand.

Even ice vendors, who could be expected to enjoy a land-office business, were hustling: Water piped into their facilities was so warm that ice-making machines struggled to keep pace.