Heat Wave Baking Texas extends to the southeast

A scorching early-summer heat wave that baked much of Texas and Oklahoma over the past week spread across the Gulf Coast on Tuesday, with dangerous heat forecasts reaching all the way to the Florida Keys.

In Austin, Texas, where the heat index rose to 118 degrees Fahrenheit last week — the highest ever recorded in the city — officials were preparing for daily high temperatures to remain above 100 “for the foreseeable future,” Kevin Snipes said. , the city’s emergency management directorate.

Ambulance calls and emergency room visits due to heat exhaustion are up in Austin and other cities, including Tulsa, Oklahoma, where tens of thousands of people were without electricity for several days last week following severe storms followed by triple-digit heat.

The high temperatures have already become fatal for some. A Florida teenage boy and his stepfather, who were hiking Friday in southern Texas’ Big Bend National Park, died when temperatures there rose to 119 degrees Fahrenheit — the second-highest figure ever recorded in the state.

“We’re in extreme heat right now,” said Thomas VandenBerg, a park ranger at Big Bend. Growing demand for electricity to cool homes and businesses has also put a strain on Texas’ independent power grid, though it seems to have held up so far.

The unusual early summer temperatures — daily highs in the low 90s are more typical for much of the region in late June — are the result of a persistent high-pressure “heat dome” rising over much of Oklahoma, Texas and northern Mexico. has hung for days.

Forecasters expect the system to slowly shift north and east during the week, spreading the brutally hot weather to parts of Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida. The heat index — a measure of how the air feels that takes both temperature and humidity into account — will reach well into the triple digits during the day in some of these locations, and temperatures won’t cool much in the evening.

The pattern could continue throughout much of the South during the Fourth of July holiday, with perhaps the greatest number of people affected on Wednesday and Thursday.

John Keefe And Jacey Fortin contributed.