Covid-19
vaccination schools and clinics
closed and a qualifying athletics event for the Olympic Games postponed:
Western Canada
and
parts of the United States
are experiencing "historic" temperature records, triggered by
a heat wave of unusual intensity
.
In
Portland
(Oregon) and
Seattle
(Washington State), two large cities in the northwestern United States known for their normally cold and humid climates, the temperature reached its highest level in recorded history (1940).
It reached 46.1 degrees
Celsius at the
Portland
airport
at noon Monday (after a record 44.4 degrees the day before) and
41.6 degrees in Seattle
, according to the US Weather Service (NWS).
But western Canada took the crown and the town of
Lytton
, in British Columbia, beat the country's all-time high, with
a temperature of 47.9 degrees
.
In this region, fans and air conditioners are exhausted and cities have opened centers to beat the heat.
Several
Covid-19
vaccination clinics
were closed and schools announced the suspension of activities due to extreme heat.
"A prolonged, dangerous and historic heat wave will persist for this entire week," warned Environnement Canada, issuing alerts for British Columbia, Alberta and parts of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Yukon and the Northwest Territories.
"It's desert heat, very dry and hot,"
said David Phillips, senior climatologist for Environment Canada.
"We are the second coldest country in the world and the snowiest," he said.
"We often see cold waves and blizzards, but we rarely talk about hot weather like this."
"Dubai would be cooler than what we are seeing now."
"Extremely dangerous"
Across the border, Americans are also experiencing sweltering temperatures in the northwestern states.
"This level of heat is extremely dangerous," the NWS warned Monday.
One Seattle market, the Ballard Farmers Market, had to close early, probably for the first time "because of the heat," said its manager, Doug Farr.
"Most of the time it is because of the snow."
On Monday,
Amazon
announced that it was opening part of its Seattle headquarters to the public as a refreshment point with a capacity of 1,000 seats.
Many homes lack air conditioning in this typically temperate city.
The average temperature for a June in Seattle is 19 degrees Celsius
.
"At 21 degrees, it's a good day, everyone is outside in shorts and T-shirts, but this is getting absurd," said a Seattle resident, stating that it felt "like I was in the desert."
Also in Portland,
many residents are taking shelter with mattresses and folding chairs in
makeshift
air-conditioned places
by local authorities.
Not far from there, in the city of Eugene, the last of the athletics events of the American teams for the Olympics had to be postponed on Sunday because of the heat wave.
The
extreme heat
, combined with an
intense drought
in the American West, has favored the appearance of several fires during the weekend.
One of them, on the border of Oregon and California, burned about 600 hectares as of Monday morning, forcing authorities to evacuate some residents and close a state highway.
"Every thousand years"
The heat wave is due to a phenomenon known as
"heat dome"
: high pressures trap hot air in the region.
The intensity of this "heat dome" is "so statistically rare that it could only be expected once every several thousand years on average," the Washington Post meteorological experts wrote.
"But human-induced climate change has made these kinds of rare events more likely."
According to Nick Bond, a climate scientist at the University of Washington, climate change is certainly a factor, but "secondary."
"The main element is this
very unusual weather pattern
" from the heat dome, he says.
That said, "climate change is real, our temperatures have warmed up here," which has "made this heat event even more severe."
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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