Jake Young is a 
It is like sweat and balls hot out, so I have a little personal story -- or rather my Dad's personal story -- to tell about heat waves. My Dad is an Emergency Room doctor, and he has been working in CA this summer for reasons that are not relevant. Anyway, one day about a week ago he had two patients come in from one nursing home with heat stroke, one with a temperature of about 104 and one with like 112. At this point I was asking, "Can that even happen?" To which he responded, "Not if you plan to survive it." Unfortunately, that patient did not survive.
My father, being suspicious that something was going on at the nursing home, sent the Fire Department over to have a look, and they reported that the ambient temperature in the halls of the nursing home was around 90 degrees. They had to evacuate the whole thing, sending old people all over the place to churches and libraries and the like.
All this goes to show a couple things:
1) Heat waves kill people. For the young, it is just unpleasant. We need to watch the elderly because for them they can be fatal.
2) The city where my Dad is working doesn't have so-called Cooling Centers, public places where anyone can come in and just cool off. These cooling centers are a good idea, and we need to have more of them. Not only does it allow people to cool off, but volunteers there can keep an eye on the elderly. If someone is showing up every day and suddenly they stop, someone can call their house to make sure they are OK. It is one more access point of preventive care for the elderly that prevents them from showing up at the hospital later with something far more serious.
Check out whether your city has cooling centers, and everyone stay safe in this heat wave.
UPDATE: Days like today also make me happy we have a walk-in fridge at our lab. I am seriously going to go hang out in there for a while.
