Baked Apple

The New York City metro area is in the midst of its first heat wave of the year, and it is a doozy. Temperatures are in the mid- to upper 90s, and the heat index is pushing well over 100 degrees. It will be a couple of days before the temperatures even come close to being seasonable.

In the meantime, Con Ed and other utilities will have their hands full keeping the power going (they had issues yesterday because of thunderstorms touched off by the unbearable heat).

There are a whole list of weather watches and warnings for the region.

The best advice is to take it easy, find a cool comfortable place to escape the heat, stay hydrated, and check in on the elderly, infirm, and children who are most susceptible to heat-related illnesses including heat exhaustion (heat prostration) and heat stroke.

UPDATE:
PSE&G finally got power restored to 75,000 customers in Essex counties after a power substation went on the fritz.

Service was restored about 5 1/2 hours after the outage began, but about 90 minutes earlier than a previous estimate, PSE&G spokeswoman Bonnie Sheppard wrote in an e-mail.

Affected customers were in parts of Orange, Irvington, Caldwell, Montclair, South Orange, Newark, East Orange and West Orange.

Just under 1,000 PSE&G customers in West Orange remained without power tonight, but that outage was not related to the one that affected the other towns, PSE&G spokeswoman Jennifer Kramer said.

The original outage started around 3 p.m. after a failed breaker caused a fire at a switching station in West Orange today, forcing PSE&G to shut power to thousands during the season's first extended heat wave.