How Hot Is Midwest? Deadly Hot

The misery-measuring heat index, which takes into account both temperature and humidity, has been horrific during the past 10 days of a Midwestern heat wave that is blamed for the deaths of 55 people. Wednesday, it maxed out at 126 degrees in Sheldon, Iowa.

But to really get a sense of the energy-sapping, eyeglass-fogging, makeup-melting weather, consider these alternative ways of measuring just how stifling it has been:

* In the first two days of training camp at Western Illinois University in Macomb, team doctors for the St. Louis Rams administered intravenous fluids to dehydrated players 26 times, even though the team goes through 200 gallons of water and as many as 20 cooler jugs of sports drink per practice.

* The corn crop in central Ohio has been so stressed that it’s developing shrunken ears, with significantly fewer kernels than normal. A variety that might produce 18 rows of kernels per ear in a typical year is struggling to grow 14 this season.

* Enterprising thieves in Kansas City, Mo., increasingly have turned their attention to air conditioners. One police precinct has lost 20 air conditioners in the past month, nearly double the total in June.

Sgt. Damon Hayes cautioned that the thefts might not be directly connected with soaring temperatures. Someone might simply have found a market for hot cooling units, he said. But Hayes added that the problem in his precinct appeared to be acute now that the heat index regularly is topping 100.

He also said he couldn’t understand how anyone, even the most determined crook, could stand cutting wires and hauling air conditioners in the blazing haze that now passes for air in these parts.

“It feels bad,” he groaned. “I feel like I’m going to die.”

To be fair, it is supposed to be hot in the heartland in July. But hot is one thing. Hot, hot, hot is another.

And, as it turns out, folks in the Midwest do have cause to gripe.

Meteorologists confirm what just about everyone has been thinking: Since July 19 or so, temperatures have been stuck a nasty 5 to 10 degrees above normal throughout a broad swath of the Midwest. St. Louis, for example, on Wednesday recorded its 14th consecutive day of temperatures higher than 90 degrees. Cincinnati sweated through eight straight days of 90-plus weather before a dip to 86 on Tuesday. And in Medicine Lodge, Kan., the temperature hit 105 Wednesday.

The humidity has made the torment even worse.

“It’s like you’re walking into an oven, basically,” is how Des Moines resident Robert Rooney described it. “It’s so humid, and the air’s so thick and hazy, it’s like you can’t see.”

Metaphor then failed him.

“It’s just like--well, it’s bad,” he concluded.

“And it doesn’t look like it’s going to let up any time soon,” said meteorologist Guy Pearson of WeatherData Inc.

Indeed, the high-pressure ridge that has trapped hot air over the Midwest is not going anywhere, meteorologists say. The swelter should continue at least through the weekend and probably into next week.

Though the Midwest holds an unquestionable claim on heat index bragging rights, much of the East has also been baking this month--and there, too, little relief is in sight.

Weather stations throughout New York state have registered a dozen 90-or-higher days this month alone--that’s as many as the state usually has during an entire summer.

Kentucky officials are asking the federal government for a disaster declaration, complaining that chickens are becoming ill and corn is shriveling.

And farmers in New York and Pennsylvania report that their crops are withering, as drought and heat continue to pound their fields.

In the Ohio Valley, where farmers wait desperately for rain, corn yields in some fields are likely to be only a third of the norm, according to Matt Swartz, an agricultural specialist for Madison County in central Ohio.

It may not be as dramatic as a hurricane or as frightening as an earthquake, but this heat wave “is another natural disaster,” said Terry Daly, a coroner’s aide in Cincinnati, where 10 people have died because of the heat. “It’s quiet, but it’s still deadly.”

In Cincinnati, as elsewhere, the broiling weather has been hardest on the elderly and the overweight. Many of those who have died in Missouri, Illinois and Ohio did not have air conditioning--or did not turn it on, either to save money or because they did not realize how overheated they were.

Medical experts say internal body temperature can soar dangerously, even though a victim may feel OK because he or she has stopped sweating and isn’t particularly thirsty. They advise those without air conditioning to seek shelter elsewhere or, at least, to soak in cool baths and drink plenty of water.

One cool-down tip that probably won’t work is to grin and bear it.

The St. Louis health commissioner advised just such an approach in 1936, during a scorching summer in which 471 people died of overheating, according to local historians. Pavement was buckling, and residents were camping in parks to escape their deadly hot brick apartment buildings. The health commissioner’s response: “Think cool”--and don’t complain.

Times have surely changed.

In an editorial earlier this week titled, “It’s not just the humidity,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch scoffed at parents who advise their kids to bear their sweaty suffering stoically--by thinking about how grateful they’ll be for a little sun come January.

“Would that we, here in this devil’s gulch, could . . . cool ourselves off by the powers of imagination,” the editorial read. It concluded: “Doesn’t work. . . . It’s too darn hot.”

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How Hot It Feels

Similar to the windchill index, the heat index expresses how humidity makes a day feel hotter than it is. For example, a 90-degree day with relative humidity of 90% has a heat index of 122 degrees.