As a heatwave pushes

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5 responses to “As a heatwave pushes”

1. 

   Athel Cornish-Bowden

   Jun 21, 2026 2:13 PM

   At this moment (10.50 in the evening) we are being bombarded with noise from La Fête de la Musique, which is about 50 m from where we live. With any luck it will finish at 12.00, or at most at 12.30. It has been cancelled by reason of the heat in many places, but not here. I’m not sure that even the alcohol ban is in force here. It is warm, but not unbearable — fairly typical for Marseilles. When much of France is collapsing from the heat we usually just have normal summer weather (maximum 29.8° today). It’s similar in winter: when everyone else is complaining how unbearably cold it is we hardly ever go below about 5°, thus no freezing.

   What I find difficult to understand is why Bordeaux usually gets it much worse than we do (and has it at this moment). One might think that they would get more protection from the Atlantic than we get from the Mediterranean, but it doesn’t seem to work like that.

   Of course, in Seattle you escape most of the worst aspects of North American weather. No freezing, no unbearable heat, no 100% humidity, no tornadoes, no hurricanes. (I’ve not been to Seattle, unless you count the airport, but I’ve spent a little time in Vancouver and Victoria.) Now tell me I’m wrong!
2. 

   Freemage

   Jun 21, 2026 3:01 PM

   I know that every once in awhile, Seattle has gotten pretty bad winters, at least by their standards (there’s a video of cars and a city bus with inadequate tires for that sort of thing sliding down the frozen hilly streets, somewhere out there on the Internet).

   But to my knowledge, it’s nowhere near like the Midwest. Chicago gets some of the worst extremes, with deep winters and sweltering summers that feel like Mother Nature is trying to remind us this area used to be a literal swamp.

   I’m a bit worried about what this summer is going to be like, honestly; it was a very mild winter, so we’ve already had some ugly days.
3. 

   Ophelia Benson

   Jun 21, 2026 5:30 PM

   Can confirm. Seattle does occasionally get walloped by a snowstorm but it’s rare. I think I probably wrote about the last one, which was quite a doozy – two or three years ago maybe? Cars definitely did slide down the hill I live at the top of which in that one. I saw one woman driving, sliding helplessly down one smallish hill approaching the main drag, and I was close enough to signal to her that she was safe to take her foot off the brake and make the turn, which she did. One car slid all the way down the main hill, which is very steep. It got rather battered!

   Because storms like that are rare here, there isn’t a lot of infrastructure to deal with them, so we just have to tough it out.
4. 

   iknklast

   Jun 22, 2026 6:41 AM

   Ophelia, Oklahoma City gets snowstorms, maybe about one a year? When it falls, it’s often ice. They also lack the infrastructure to deal with it, and Texas is worse. In both of their cases, though, I suspect it has a lot more to do with not spending money.

   In Nebraska, we have a great infrastructure. The plows are out almost immediately, they salt the streets, and clear at least enough to get basic things done. We still get enough snow that people are willing to pay for it…in fact, every year there is a contest to name the new snowplows. That’s fun…

   Unfortunately, I’m not sure we have quite as good an infrastructure for dealing with the higher heat we’ve gotten in recent years.
5. 

   Ophelia Benson

   Jun 22, 2026 11:52 AM

   PS Athel it’s no longer true that Seattle never gets unbearable heat. There was a bad heat wave a few years ago in which we reached 106F. I remember what it felt like.