Tens of millions of Americans already baking in a scorching heat wave braced Saturday for record-setting temperatures to climb, while a major fire ravaged part of California.
The country’s central and northeast regions face the brunt of the extreme temperatures, which are not expected to peak until Sunday at the earliest and have sent public health officials scrambling.
A heat emergency is meanwhile in effect for cities up and down the northeast coast, from Boston to Philadelphia to Washington.
The high temperatures, which demonstrate the threat of global warming, have already caused an uptick in emergency calls for heat-related illness.
“This is really one of the things that we recognize in Oklahoma — heat is the number one weather-related killer across the United States. It far surpasses any other” nature-related cause of death, Joseph Kralicek, director of the Tulsa Area Emergency Management Agency, told CNN.
The nation’s capital was predicted to reach temperatures at or near 100 degrees Fahrenheit Saturday, with New York not far behind.
“Look for daytime max temps to eclipse the century mark in the Central Plains and record breaking high temps from the Central Plains to the Northeast today,” the National Weather Service said in a forecast.
The sweltering heat has increased the risk of blazes, such as the major Oak Fire, which broke out Friday in California near Yosemite National Park where giant sequoias have already been threatened by fire in recent days.
In recent years, California and other parts of the western United States have been ravaged by huge, hot and fast-moving wildfires, driven by years of drought and a warming climate.
Various regions of the globe have been hit by extreme heat waves in recent months, such as Western Europe in July and India in March to April, incidents that scientists say are an unmistakable sign of climate change.
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Originally published as US heat wave soars as California wildfire rages
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