Deadly heat

last updated 8 January 2015

Phoenix

A heat wave killed 18 people, most of them homeless, in Phoenix last week, as record temperatures scorched 200 cities across the West and Midwest before spreading to the East Coast. The high reached 117 degrees in Las Vegas, and 129 in Death Valley. Officials in Chicago, where the temperature hit 104, checked on 40,000 elderly people and shuttled those without air conditioning to “cooling centers,” under an emergency plan developed after 700 people died in a 1995 heat wave. “On a day like today,” said Joyce Gallagher, commissioner of the city’s Department on Aging, “every single senior who doesn’t have air conditioning is at risk.”