The record June temperatures forced residents to flee their apartments for movie theaters and splash pads. Workers armed themselves with frozen water bottles and ducked inside air-conditioned stores on their breaks. Parents kept their kids home from summer camps, and dog owners outfitted their pups with booties to protect their paws from the scalding ground.
Day three of the heat wave in New England brought dangerous weather throughout the Northeast, as a heat dome pushed some cities to break daily records and sent people scrambling for a reprieve.
Worcester, Milton, Providence, and Concord, N.H., all broke daily records. In New York, it was the hottest day since 2012.
Heat waves like these are becoming more extreme due to climate change, and are particularly dangerous in New England, a region more accustomed to — and prepared for — the cold than the heat.
Many apartments here don’t have air conditioning. The electric grid can be strained by big jumps in demand for electricity as people crank up the air conditioning. Trains have to run more slowly to avoid potentially overheating electronic systems and buckling tracks. On Tuesday, multiple commuter lines experienced delays, a spokesperson said.
As people succumbed to heat exhaustion this week, Boston EMS saw a 10 percent increase in calls on Monday. Emergency responders were called to 17 heat-related incidents for patients ranging from 11 to 84 years old.
On Tuesday, the emergency department at Tufts Medical Center saw an uptick in heat illness cases, a spokesperson said. Dr. Lauren Rice, chief of pediatric emergency medicine, added that she’s seen more patients complaining of fatigue, headaches, and heart palpitations — all of which can be symptoms of heat exposure.
“People always think they’re more hydrated than they are,” she said.
Near the Chinatown gate Tuesday morning, in one of the hottest areas of the city, Pablo Rodriguez Andrade, 44, wore a dark long-sleeved shirt and pants. His greenway sanitation uniform was not exactly summer wear.
Rodriguez Andrade crouched down toward the asphalt with his handheld trash grabber and snagged a few pieces of paper and candy wrappers. For his job at the Rose Kennedy Greenway, he’d be under the sun for the next eight hours.
How is he feeling about the weather?
“Oh my God, horrible,” Rodriguez Andrade said, shaking his head with a laugh.
The heat dome is expected to keep the city dangerously hot through Wednesday. Heat is the leading weather-related cause of death in the United States, according to National Weather Service data, and experts say older people and those who work outdoors are particularly vulnerable. Symptoms of heat illness include headache, dizziness, nausea, confusion, and hot skin.
Rodriguez Andrade said his boss told him he could take 10 to 15 minutes longer during his breaks.
Otherwise, it was business as usual.
At 10:15 a.m., Billy Meyers, 52, stood down the block from his temporary apartment building in Cambridge. He was sweaty and holding a stack of newspapers called “Spare Change,” a street paper written by and for unhoused and low-income people. Meyers was selling the papers for $2 apiece, hoping to make at least $30 that morning so that he could duck inside to a nearby convenience store to escape the heat.
“I couldn’t be in there right now,” Meyers said of his room at the Central House, a men’s affordable housing complex. He doesn’t have an air conditioning unit in the room. “It’s hotter in there than it is out here.”
In Massachusetts, landlords are required by law to heat living spaces above 68 degrees during the day and 64 degrees at night. But there’s no similar regulation for keeping apartments cool during extreme heat. Landlords are also not required to provide air conditioning.
“Definitely I think there are some regulations missing,” said Patricia Fabián, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Health at Boston University who has studied heat and public health.
“Anybody who either doesn’t have air conditioning or can’t afford to pay for air conditioning [is at risk],” Fabián said.
Another concern is whether the air conditioning is actually working: Many residents on Tuesday complained that their window units couldn’t keep up with the high temperatures. Boston’s older housing stock often means poor insulation, reducing the effectiveness of air conditioning for residents and increasing power usage, experts said.
With higher power usage comes higher prices, and on Tuesday, electricity prices all across New England spiked.
Some neighborhoods are hotter than others. Often, the hottest areas are those that lack greenery, typically because they have not historically had much investment, in part due to a legacy of racist housing policies, Fabián said.
In Boston, there are heat islands in Chinatown, East Boston, Chelsea, South Boston, and the South End. The areas with the most dense development tend to trap the most heat. Using handheld temperature gauges on Tuesday, Globe reporters recorded 101 degrees in Chelsea and 103 in Dorchester.
In East Boston, one of those neighborhoods with heat islands, Adam Amadeo, 50, sat in the shade in front of the Boston Housing Authority building where he lives, near Maverick Square. He doesn’t have air conditioning in his unit — it’s too expensive. Instead, he and most of his neighbors use box fans, he said.
“It’s not supposed to be this hot in Massachusetts,” Amadeo said. He said he worries about climate change; he grew up in Boston, and every summer it seems to get hotter.
The property manager at Amadeo’s building said they’d installed five AC window units as of midday Tuesday. She also said that there are cooling spaces in the building.
Also in East Boston, Andres Betancur, 35, stood on a shaded corner of Maverick Square.
“The heat is unbearable,” he said. To manage, he takes cold showers at home.
Because Betancur works in demolition, the only way to stay cool on the job is to step into whatever air-conditioned stores are nearby during his breaks.
There is no federal workplace protection to ensure employers provide adequate water and breaks for employees during extreme temperatures. Nor is there any local regulatory protection, although it’s been discussed this year by Massachusetts state lawmakers and Boston city councilors.
Outdoor workers are at a particularly high risk during heat waves. Several said they’ve felt sick this week.
In downtown Providence, for example, landscaper Alex Barrera, 25, said he almost fainted while working on Monday.
“I never felt like that before,” he said.
Late Tuesday afternoon, he was waiting for a bus at Kennedy Plaza, where even the pigeons congregated in the shade of nearby trees.
He had Tuesday off because of the heat.
And once he gets home, he said, he planned to stay inside.
Sabrina Shankman, Emily Spatz, Maria Probert, and Angela Mathew of the Globe staff contributed.
Erin Douglas can be reached at erin.douglas@globe.com. Follow her @erinmdouglas23. Ava Berger can be reached at ava.berger@globe.com. Follow her @Ava_Berger_. Nathan Metcalf can be reached at nathan.metcalf@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram @natpat_123. Jade Lozada can be reached at jade.lozada@globe.com. Omar Mohammed can be reached at omar.mohammed@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter (X) @shurufu. Camilo Fonseca can be reached at camilo.fonseca@globe.com. Follow him on X @fonseca_esq and on Instagram @camilo_fonseca.reports. Ken Mahan can be reached at ken.mahan@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram @kenmahantheweatherman.
