But Kyoto's bad for the American economy
Just got mailed this by a friend. Happily, illustrious world leader Dubya is sitting safely in air-conditioned splendour, valliantly defending the American economy.
PHOENIX, July 22 - A relentless and lethal blanket of heat has settled on much of the western United States, forcing the cancellation of dozens ofairline flights, threatening the loss of electrical power, stokingwildfires and leaving 20 people dead in Phoenix alone in just the past week.Fourteen of the victims here are thought to have been homeless, althoughthe heat also claimed the life of a 97-year-old man who died in hisbedroom, a 37-year-old man who succumbed in his car and two older women whodied in homes without air-conditioning.Daytime highs in Phoenix have remained near 110 degrees for more than a week, and municipal officials acknowledge that it is almost impossible to deal with the needs of the estimated 10,000 to 20,000 people living on the streets. The city has barely 1,000 shelter beds, and hundreds of them are available only in the winter.The lack of preparation for the homeless here is obvious to those sweltering on the sidewalk outside the Society of St. Vincent de Paulrelief center in a zone of desolation between the office towers of downtownPhoenix and the State Capitol."I'm dying out here," said a homeless man in his 40's who goes by the name of Romeo, crouched in a sliver of shade on a littered sidewalk while waiting for a handout meal and a bottle of water. "The police are making us move all over the place. Where do they expect us to go? They need some more shelters."The Phoenix police and private social service agencies have been passing out thousands of bottles of water donated by grocery chains and individuals. But the fierce heat continues to take a toll."We've not seen anything like this before," said Tony Morales, a Phoenix police detective. "We get heat-related deaths every summer, usually 5 to 10 deaths through the whole summer, but nothing like this."In Maricopa County as a whole, which includes Phoenix and its suburbs, 21 people died of heat exposure all of last year, just one more than the city's toll in the last several days.Officials of the National Weather Service estimate that more than 200 heat records have been broken in the West during the last two weeks. On Tuesday,Las Vegas tied its record for any date, 117 degrees. Reno and other locations in Nevada have set records with nine consecutive days of temperatures at 100 or higher. The temperature in Denver on Wednesday reached 105 degrees, making it the hottest day there since 1878. The highest temperature for the entire region during the heat wave has been129, recorded at Death Valley, Calif.The weather forced airlines to cancel more than two dozen flights thisweek, remove passengers from fully loaded planes, limit the number of tickets sold on some flights and take other measures to withstand the heat.The reasons for that are related to engineering. Aircraft manufacturers have customarily set temperature limits at which their planes can be safely operated. (The limits are lower at higher altitudes, as in the RockyMountains, and higher at lower altitudes, as in the desert that surroundsLas Vegas.) High temperatures mean aircraft engines must take in more air in order to create the greater thrust the planes need to leave the ground.But airplane makers also have limits on the amount of thrust that an engine can produce. If the engines exceed those limits, they may not perform properly. At that point, aircraft manufacturers advise, the airlines should remove weight from planes - either passengers or cargo - or, in the worst cases, not fly at all.United Airlines canceled seven United Express flights out of Denver onWednesday, when the record-tying temperature there exceeded the operatinglimit for the carrier's propeller planes, said a spokesman, Jeff Green. "Itwas just so extreme, and stayed on so long, that we had to cancel flights,"Mr. Green said. America West canceled 22 flights out of its Las Vegas hub this week, 11 each on Monday and Tuesday. The temperature of 117 there was approachingthe limit for America West's regional jets: 117.26, above which they should not fly, said Linda Larsen, a spokeswoman for Mesa Airlines, which operates the flights for America West.On the other hand, Southwest Airlines, one of the biggest carriers operating in Las Vegas and Phoenix, has not canceled any flights because of the heat, a spokesman said. And Frontier Airlines merely refused to fly any pets.The extraordinary heat has lasted for many weeks in the Southwestern desert, where it has exacted a high price in lives along the Mexican border. Officials of the United States Bureau of Customs and BorderProtection say 101 illegal migrants have died of heat so far this fiscal year, which runs from October through September. That compares with 95 heat-related deaths in all of the previous 12 months.Twenty-one border crossers have died in Arizona just since July 1, saidSalvador Zamora, a spokesman for the border agency. The agency has stepped up its efforts to rescue migrants from the heat, using trucks and helicopters to aid people in distress in the brutal sun.Here in Phoenix, where the issue of rescue involves the homeless, Moises Gallegos, the city's deputy director of community services, said that space was available in downtown shelters but that some of the homeless refused to use it. Some are drug or alcohol abusers who do not want to be tested and treated, a condition for entry, and others are mentally ill and refuse all offers of help, Mr. Gallegos said.But some private social service agencies contend that there is a critical lack of shelter space here, and criticize officials for not opening a 500-bed city-owned homeless shelter that is used only in the winter."We need a year-round overflow shelter," said Terry Bower, director of the Human Services Campus Day Resource Center. Elsewhere in Arizona, firefighters are struggling to contain a swarm of 20 wildfires around the state, most sparked by lightning, including a 60,000-acre blaze northeast of Phoenix that shut several major highways. Across the West as a whole, 32 large wildfires are burning, fueled by the heat, dry conditions and a profusion of brush created by the winter's heavy rains, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.And in California, the state's Independent System Operator, which handles the flow of power to three-quarters of California customers, declared a Stage 2 emergency on Thursday and Friday, the first in two years. Stage 2 means that utilities are within 5 percent of their maximum production ofelectricity and that interruption of power to some customers is possible.Stephanie McCorkle, a spokeswoman for the Independent System Operator, said the emergency was in effect for Southern California and asked residents to conserve electricity. Ms. McCorkle said the system had experienced 14 consecutive days in which demand in Southern California was near capacity."The Bay Area is not hot, and that has been our saving grace," she said."L.A. is sizzling."Craig Schmidt, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's regional headquarters in Salt Lake City, said records had been falling across theWestern states since the heat wave started on July 12. In Phoenix, it was at least 110 every day from July 11 to 19; on Friday the temperature peaked at 108.There may be some relief in sight, though: monsoons are moving into the area. The rain and cloud cover will cool things down a bit, officials said, but humidity will rise, prolonging the misery."Throughout the Western states - you have to estimate, but more than 200 records have probably been broken, and that's just talking daily records,"Mr. Schmidt said. "These records are no fun to break." Among the most remarkable was the one in Las Vegas, where the 117-degree reading on Tuesday matched the record for any date, set in 1942. The 95-degree low on Tuesday was also a record for Las Vegas, as was the average temperature that day, 104 degrees.In Death Valley, meanwhile, the temperature never dropped below 100 degrees in two 24-hour periods. Mr. Schmidt attributes the heat to a high pressure system that refused to budge."This one went on for so long, because there's a very strong ridge of high pressure centered over Utah and Arizona," he said, "and it kept the monsoon moisture from working its way northward. That usually cools things off with thunderstorms and clouds."Andy Bailey, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Las Vegas, said:"It's probably fair to say what just wrapped up was probably the most intense heat wave the city's ever seen. We had a string of four days where it was 115 or above."Now, however, the region is facing a new threat from the expected summer monsoons and thunderstorms, Mr. Bailey said."We're concerned with flash flooding today and tomorrow," he said. Micheline Maynard contributed reporting from New York for this article,Katie Zezima from Boston and John Dougherty from Phoenix.
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