![]() At 10:14, a barefoot man wearing a T-shirt and blue sweatpants was found lying in the grass a caller to 911 said that the man was coherent but in need of help, likely because of the heat. on Saturday, June 26th, thermometers already read eighty-two degrees. She warned her colleagues, “People can literally bake in their homes.”īy 10 A.M. She knew the severity of the physiological stress: how the heart works harder to move blood around so that a person can dissipate heat through the skin, the face going red because the blood vessels are open, trying to radiate that heat how overnight cooling is needed to give the vascular system a break. Vines, the health officer, had studied deadly heat waves. Voss would help lead the teams working at the shelters and sort out the logistics of securing beds, food, water, and other supplies. ![]() The largest would be at the Oregon Convention Center, capable of housing hundreds of people. Emergency officials decided to open three cooling shelters and to keep them running around the clock. He marvelled at the number of people on the monitor in front of him: dozens of administrators from all over the region, including crisis managers from neighboring cities and unincorporated areas and officials from health, human-services, and transportation departments and from the National Weather Service.Ī representative from the National Weather Service told the participants on the call that the nighttime lows could be as high as eighty degrees, with no breeze there would be no reprieve after the sun went down. On June 23rd, in Portland, inside a labyrinthine government building across the Willamette River from downtown, Chris Voss, the emergency-management director for Multnomah County, joined a teleconference call. ![]() It stalled over British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon, sealing in the heat. This led to what’s called, colloquially, a heat dome, a high-pressure system in which hot air is trapped over a single geographic area. After the storm diminished, its force continued on, crimping the jet stream into a sharply curved band, or what meteorologists refer to as an omega block, because it resembles the Greek letter. But a number of atmospheric scientists believe that it may be what gave the jet stream a snap. Typhoon Champi caused no serious damage and no loss of human life. ![]() As the typhoon moved farther north, though, it weakened and then disappeared altogether on its way toward Alaska. It turned north on June 22nd, and as the storm, called Champi, neared Japan it became a typhoon, with winds as strong as ninety-two miles per hour. The next day, as the tropical depression moved northwest, past Guam, it gathered enough force-sustained winds of forty miles per hour-to qualify as a tropical storm. On June 20th, a tropical depression that appeared in the western Pacific, near Micronesia, may have been the beginning of such a disruption. The pattern of these curves is usually predictable, the weather associated with them-warm or cold spells, rain or snow-sticking around for a week or two, unless a significant event disrupts it. There are typically four or six curves in the rope, the result of the temperature differences between the equator and the North Pole. The high winds that make up the polar jet stream encircle the Northern Hemisphere like a loosely draped rope. ![]()
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