More than 161 million people are under heat alerts as extreme weather sparks warnings and health fears.
The Western United States continues to grapple with an oppressive heat wave that is believed to have killed at least seven people, authorities say, and has prompted safety warnings across large swaths of the country.
The extreme heat event has broken records across the West, while further fueling concerns about the impacts of the climate crisis.
On Wednesday, the city of Las Vegas in Nevada was preparing to surpass its previous record of four consecutive days above 46.1 degrees Celsius (115 degrees Fahrenheit).
This comes after the heat in the city broke the 2021 single-day record of 46.6°C (116°F) when it hit 48.8°C (120°F) on Sunday.
“This is the most extreme heat wave in the history of record in Las Vegas dating back to 1937,” said meteorologist John Adair, a three-decade veteran of the National Weather Service office in Southern Nevada.
Alyse Sobosan, a local resident, said this July has been the hottest month in her 15 years of living in Las Vegas. “It’s stiflingly hot,” she told The Associated Press. “It’s like you can’t live your life.”
Health authorities have stressed that heat can pose serious health risks.
“Even average-aged people who are seemingly healthy can get heat illness when it’s so hot that it’s hard for the body to cool itself,” said Alexis Brignola, an epidemiologist with the Southern Nevada Health District.
The heat wave has also broken records in the northwestern states of Oregon and Washington in recent days, with temperatures topping 103 degrees Fahrenheit (39.4 degrees Celsius) in the city of Portland and 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40.5 degrees Celsius) in Salem and Eugene.
The Oregon state medical examiner said Tuesday that heat is believed to have caused at least six deaths.
A motorcyclist also died from heat exposure in California's Death Valley National Park on Saturday, when temperatures there reached 128 degrees Fahrenheit (53.3 degrees Celsius).
In both states, hot, dry conditions also fueled wildfires, including a new blaze in Oregon called the Larch Creek Fire, which quickly grew to more than 5 square miles (12 square kilometers) by Tuesday night.
In California, firefighters were battling at least 18 wildfires Tuesday, including a 42-square-mile (109-square-kilometer) blaze that prompted evacuation orders for about 200 homes in the mountains of Santa Barbara County.
Impact of Hurricane Beryl
The heatwave comes after June marked the 13th consecutive month of record-breaking monthly temperatures around the world.
In total, more than 161 million people across the United States were placed under a heat alert on Tuesday.
The threat was particularly pronounced in the southern state of Texas, where more than a million people were left without power after Hurricane Beryl, with the city of Houston particularly hard hit.
On Tuesday, a day after the storm made landfall, U.S. President Joe Biden approved a major disaster declaration, opening up federal resources to the state.
“The biggest concern right now is the power outages and extreme heat that is affecting Texans,” Biden said in a statement. He cited the high rate of extreme heat deaths in the United States, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates at about 1,220 a year.
“As everyone knows, extreme heat kills more Americans than all other natural disasters combined,” he said.
At least one person in Louisiana and six people in Texas were killed when Beryl made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane. That came after the storm had moved across the Caribbean and killed at least 11 people.
