Places where you can escape the heat cheaply
There are many indoor places you can cool off and keep yourself entertained that may not immediately spring to mind, like a swimming pool or the beach.
Michigan residents faced a series of dangerous weather events on Tuesday, including extreme heat with temperatures reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit, severe thunderstorms that knocked out power to about 350,000 homes and businesses, and triggered tornado sirens.
“This was the kind of instability we see once or twice a year,” Dave Kook, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in White Lake Township, told the Free Press Tuesday afternoon as he watched the storms sweep across the state. “And now it’s here.”
In addition to the heat and heavy storms, the weather service had warned early in the morning that the unusual summer weather could also bring with it the danger of destructive gusts of wind and even hailstones.
As of 8 p.m., nearly 153,000 Consumers Energy customers in northern Michigan and the Grand Rapids metropolitan area were without power due to severe storms. The utility promised to “work through the night” to restore power. Another 197,000 DTE Energy customers in southeast Michigan were without power.
DTE said in its online “storm update” that the utility was working to restore operations “as quickly and safely as possible” and was bringing in hundreds of additional employees “from outside our region” “to expedite recovery.”
The outages forced businesses such as grocery stores to close, various organizations such as Boy Scout groups to cancel their nightly meetings in churches and other public places, and left intersections, already more dangerous due to the heavy rain, without working traffic lights.
More: Corn sweat could make the Midwest heat wave seem even more sweltering. Yes, corn sweat.
The good news, however, was that most Michiganders seemed to take the warnings seriously. Some tried to take them with humor. And the extreme heat in the state, meteorologists said, is not expected to last much longer.
The weather service’s heat warning, accompanied by colorful yellow and red graphics on social media early Tuesday, advised taking breaks in the shade at construction sites, checking on the elderly, sick and those “without air conditioning,” never leaving children or pets in the car and limiting strenuous outdoor activities.
The warning prompted several school closings and changed schedules in the Detroit metropolitan area and throughout the southern part of the state. Detroit schools, all of which do not have air conditioning, adjusted their schedules. Eastpointe and Southfield schools did the same.
Several school districts in western Michigan, including Grand Rapids, Hudsonville, Portage, Ionia and other communities, also announced closures and early dismissals.
However, some astute observers point out that this is unlikely to solve the problem, as many children live in homes without air conditioning or other means of cooling down and must therefore resort to libraries or other public places.
Thousands of heat-related deaths
Even more than the day’s news, climate scientists worry that Tuesday’s heat is the sign of a larger – and more damaging – trend that, if more is not done, will worsen and threaten not only human health but the entire planet.
Extreme heat is becoming a growing threat and is considered a likely problem by health and other experts, as climate projections suggest it will become more frequent and intense in the coming decades. In addition, the number of heat-related deaths has increased in recent years.
And worldwide, last June and July were among the hottest since weather records began.
The heat warning for Michigan was also part of a broader weather pattern stretching across the central and eastern United States, and recent news reports suggest this week’s unseasonably high temperatures could even break records and put an end to what felt like early fall weather for a few days.
According to meteorologists, the actual temperature in southeast Michigan was over 30 degrees.
But the heat index (the perceived heat as opposed to the actual temperature) was closer to 100 and posed all sorts of health risks: heat exhaustion, heat stroke, dehydration, asthma, lack of sleep, hospitalization for heart disease, and even cognitive impairment.
And while it can be difficult to quantify the number of heat-related deaths, researchers say more people nationwide die as a result of this event than any other weather event.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, there were 1,602 heat-related deaths in 2021, rising to 1,722 in 2022 and 2,302 in 2023. Given the dangerously hot weather in June and now August, that number could be high in 2024 as well.
Warming lakes, forest fires
In addition to threatening human health, research shows that the heat also creates drier conditions, which in turn leads to warming lakes and oceans, melting polar ice caps and glaciers, more frequent periods of wildfires and an increasing depletion of forest fuels.
Weather forecasters found that reduced moisture in forests in the Western United States between 1979 and 2015 caused wildfire areas to double between 1984 and 2015. And higher temperatures are expected to spark even more fires.
And the fires affect air quality, which also poses a threat to human health.
Climate scientists warn that hot summers are becoming more frequent and more intense. Concern about weather extremes is so great that this year more than two dozen groups petitioned the federal government to include extreme heat as a requirement for disaster relief.
However, meteorologists expect the weather to cool down this week and temperatures to reach over 21 degrees next week.
Still, most people on social media seemed to take Tuesday’s warnings seriously, contacting the weather service to learn more about the risks – especially regarding tornadoes – and supplementing the information by posting their own concerns and witty comments.
One person urged pet owners to provide water “for animals outside.”
Another said: “Too hot for me” with an animation of a woman sweating in the blazing sun.
And someone else, who said on their online profile that they were originally from Howell but now live in the South, may have joked, “Just a normal day here in Alabama.” To which someone else responded, “And that’s why we don’t live in Alabama.”
Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or [email protected].
