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Werner Bartens and Marlene Weiss
Portland, Oregon, in the northwestern United States, is usually a city with an extremely mild climate. If you still want to complain about the weather, you can only complain about the frequent rain, especially in the winter months. At the moment, however, the city and with it large parts of the west coast of Canada and the USA are being hit by an unprecedented heat wave. The previous all-time heat record for Portland was 107 Fahrenheit, about 41.7 degrees Celsius. It was broken on Saturday, again on Sunday, and again on Tuesday with an unbelievable 46.7 degrees. The heat is so great that residents are fleeing to refrigerated community centers. In Lytton, a village a little further north in the Canadian province of British Columbia, the thermometer climbed to a spectacular 49.6 degrees on Tuesday – an absolute historical record for Canada. These are temperatures that no one can withstand for a long time.