East Coast Burning Up

Another wave of oppressive heat clamped down on a broad swath of Eastern states yesterday and today, reports the AP, with temperatures in the high 90s and 100s and residents scrambling for shade or just staying indoors. In the Mid-Atlantic, already the locus for brutal temperatures several times in July, weather experts warned of dangerous conditions and residents resigned themselves to coping with the discomfort. "Oh, it's disgusting. It's already really hot," complained one meteorologist in Washington, DC.

One possible weather-related death was reported in Maryland, where paramedics said the high temperatures and humidity likely played a role in the death of a 20-year-old man who was biking, went into cardiac arrest and hit his head on a tree as he fell. By midday yesterday, a wide band from lower New England to the Deep South was under a heat advisory. Another meteorologist says the off-and-on scorching heat in the Mid-Atlantic can be blamed on "a Bermuda high" between Bermuda and North Carolina that is pushing hot, humid air into the region. (More warm weather stories.)