NoAfter the highest temperature on record, forensic doctors fear dozens of heat-related deaths in Canada’s British Columbia province. As a spokesman said, there are usually about 130 deaths recorded from Friday to Monday. During the same period of the past few days, more than 230 deaths were reported for the province in the west of the country. “We believe the extreme heat contributed to the huge increase,” the head of forensic medicine said on Tuesday.
Like the Pacific Northwest of the United States, Canada’s west was shocked by an unprecedented heat wave last weekend. The city of Lytton, north of Vancouver, where June averaged 24 degrees, measured 49.5 degrees on Tuesday, the highest ever recorded in Canada. British Columbia’s prime minister urged the province’s five million or more residents to care for elderly neighbors and keep cold compresses in the fridge.
The heat wave continued south of the Canada-US border. In the states of Oregon and Washington, hundreds have come to emergency rooms with temperature complaints over the past few days. The Seattle Times reported that a sixty-five-year-old from Seattle and a sixty-eight-year-old from Enamclaw died of hyperthermia in temperatures above 42 degrees.
In Portland, Oregon, which hit the previous day’s record of 46.6 degrees on Monday, the heat broke power lines and road surfaces. U.S. meteorologists explained the dangerously high temperatures with a summer bell in which a high pressure area rests like a lid over the Pacific Northwest.
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