I Declare The Heat Is Over

The heat wave is over, clearing the way to let us blast the A/C again:

While residents of the region waited for cooler weather to arrive overnight, the human toll of the heat wave became apparent, with at least four deaths linked to the weather: a woman who died after passing out in her Long Island home, a couple who died in their Newark apartment, and a man found unconscious on the Brooklyn waterfront.

Temperatures remained brutal. The National Weather Service reported record highs for the date at La Guardia Airport (99 degrees), Kennedy International Airport (99) and Newark Liberty International Airport (100). Records were also set in Islip, N.Y., at 98 degrees, and Bridgeport, Conn., at 97. The temperature in Central Park reached 96, which was short of a record, and today a high of a mere 85 is expected.

Meanwhile, the city came dangerously close to a widespread blackout:

Consolidated Edison faced its greatest risk of a power failure since the nine-day blackout in western Queens last month, after a series of manhole fires and explosions yesterday morning near Kips Bay and Gramercy Park in Manhattan.

In the two electrical networks that make up that area, high-voltage feeder cables began to fail. In the early afternoon, 7 of 36 were out of action, threatening the power supply to a broad section of the East Side, from 14th to 40th Streets. By nightfall, most of the cables had been fixed.

To take some pressure off its equipment, Con Ed reduced the voltage that customers received by 5 to 8 percent for parts of the day, in all of Brooklyn and Queens and in parts of Manhattan.

The utility took the extraordinary step of taking its own headquarters, at 4 Irving Place near Union Square, off the electrical grid and putting it on generator power, and having crews race door to door on the East Side, urging businesses and residents to shut off power.

The city medical examiner’s office was evacuated because of smoke from a Con Edison transformer that caught fire. It lost electricity for about five hours and had to use emergency generators to keep its refrigerated morgue between 32 and 40 degrees. Several bodies scheduled for autopsies were moved to Queens.

One of those bodies was that of an unidentified man, believed to be in his early 30’s, who had been found unconscious along the piers near the mouth of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. He was pronounced dead at Maimonides Medical Center at 6:40 p.m. on Wednesday. The city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, said yesterday that the man appeared to be a victim of heat stroke and that alcohol, which worsens dehydration, might have been a factor in his death.