Too little drinking water

Automatically saved draft

(Bild: APA/AP)

Although the authorities have been repeatedly warning of the dangers of the heatwave in many parts of the USA for days, recreational athletes are taking these warnings lightly - with fatal consequences. Three hikers died on Monday. 

A 52-year-old man and his 23-year-old daughter died during a hike in Canyonlands National Park in the state of Utah, the authorities announced on Monday. The two were lost and did not have enough drinking water with them in temperatures of around 38 degrees Celsius. When they were found by park rangers, they were already dead.

In Snow Canyon Nature Park in the same state, a 30-year-old woman was found dead during a rescue operation for two hikers suffering from the effects of the heat. The west of the USA has been experiencing extremely high temperatures for the past two weeks, which have already led to several deaths.

Temperature record in Las Vegas
On Monday, 150 million people in the region were under an extreme heat warning. In the casino city of Las Vegas, the highest temperature ever recorded was recorded a week and a half ago at 48.9 degrees. 

Hurricane in Chicago
Meanwhile, in the so-called Midwest in the center of the USA, severe storms and equally extreme heat kept people on tenterhooks. A band of "destructive thunderstorms" moved through the state of Illinois on Monday evening, according to the US weather service. Several tornadoes had been reported in the past two days, and employees of the agency in the metropolis of Chicago had also had to briefly seek shelter from a hurricane. 

Hundreds of thousands of households without power
Local media reported uprooted trees and toppled electricity pylons. There were initially no reports of injuries. According to NBC, tornadoes are extremely rare in Chicago. The last time a tornado was confirmed in the city was in August 2020. In addition to Illinois, the neighboring state of Indiana was also affected by the storms. According to the website poweroutage.us, more than 500,000 households in the two states lost power. 

The storms were triggered by cool air masses from Canada, which collided with a so-called heat dome - an area of high pressure that traps the heat as if under a large dome - over the center and east of the USA.