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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

> Temperatures in some locations from Philadelphia to Boston could be the hottest in any month in over a decade. Additional records could fall Wednesday and Thursday.

Boston here (home of decaying old red brick pizza oven buildings, not designed for modern summers).

This morning, as we enter a forecast high of 102F real temp, and heat index up to 110, my own old building is trying to get a 5-hour water shutdown of our entire building of ~100 residents, including elderly... postponed until after the scorching peak of the heat wave is over.

Not only do we have neither the architecture nor the acclimation for hot climate, but we don't even know what's ridiculously stupid behavior in such a climate.

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I don't miss my old 3rd floor, top floor apartment in an old brick building with a black roof and no AC in Boston. I put up with that for a decade before I upgraded.

Yep, flat black roof. 20 years ago, I'd get through Boston summers fine without AC. On the hottest days, just put down the blinds for the afternoon. And about one week per summer, I used a small fan.

I'm ready to upgrade, as soon as I know what city I'll be moving/staying to, after new job/startup search (and what my budget will be).

Good luck! I'm still in the area, beautiful city, but the housing stock sucks for what it costs.

Do you have roof access?

It's not going to be terribly windy in Boston... There are places that sell/rent temporary roof coverings, mainly for protecting from storm damage until it can get fixed. But anyway, white/reflective coverings are available, and can be held down with a few bricks for a week.

Good idea; I can't do it on this building, but I'll keep it in mind.

> This morning, as we enter a forecast high of 102F real temp, and heat index up to 110..

ok that's hot. Being from Dallas, I usually poke fun at the NE when temps get warm there just like the NE pokes fun at the South when we get an inch of snow. However, 102 with humidity and heat index of 110 is hot no matter what. When it's that hot here i try to take off shoes/socks whenever possible and soak down my head and wash my face. A lot of heat is shed through your feet and head. But you reach a point where there's just no escape, once the concrete is heated up it takes weeks for it to cool back down. The feeling of a breeze only making it hotter instead of cooler is not pleasant, my sympathies.

edit: btw, i don't see how people in AZ survive, the temps in Phoenix and other places just seem incompatible with life. The usual reply is "low humidity" but the inside of your oven is low humidity too, i wouldn't want to live there either.

just fill up a bath or washbasin and you should have plenty of water to last 5 hours, even in a heatwave...

I actually sent that advice and a few other tips to people on my building's email list already.

Unfortunately, with ~100 people, and a general culture in the university neighborhood of non-cooperative, non-engaged, disconnected... there's a real chance that not everyone is going to do all the right things, and someone will get heat exhaustion or heat stroke.

>unfortunately, with ~100 people, and a general culture in the university neighborhood of non-cooperative, non-engaged, disconnected

It's not the neighborhood, it's the people who inhabit it.

Just remove the word "university" and trade all the street parked Prius's in for driveway parked Tacomas and you've basically just described every snooty neighborhood in <shuffles cards> Wayland or <shuffles again> Dedham.

I assure you that just as many people in the suburbs are "not doing the right thing" or are otherwise completely surprised by outlier weather events. 100deg temps just have less consequences when you're not 22, living in an apartment with no A/C and drank yourself to a .3 the prior evening.

I don't know what the purpose of the shutdown is, but filling up a bathtub would probably lead to way more usage than if they hadn't cut off the water supply.

Bathtubs are tiny users of water. Anyone city with a water supply problem is worried about people watering lawns which will use orders of magnitude more water.

In addition to that, if this is an old building, then I'd bet that the reason for the water shutoff is to fix a leak. If there's a leak, it's likely that the leak is leaking into the structure somewhere.

Might be that five days of leakage are much, much more water wasted [0] than if everyone in the building stocks several gallons of water for use during the shutoff period.

[0] And in this case, actually wasted because they'll not make it to a drain to get to a water treatment plant.

Ah yes, I forgot you have lawns, thanks.

Grass lawns for pleasure were invented on a wet rock in the North Atlantic, and even we here have to stop watering them during drought conditions (aka hosepipe ban). It baffles me that people have them in parts of the USA.

Grass lawns grow very well without any added water in most of North America. It will go brown in dry conditions, but as soon as it rains it comes back. Of course as a large continent there are deserts where a lawn cannot grow without constant watering, but the vast majority of North America is plenty wet for a lawn to grow.

A significant minority wants green grass year round and those people water their lawn. It is not a majority though.

We don't live in such an area (we live in the high desert), but a lot of people around here have lush, green, watered lawns. It's the opposite of the places where people have to fight encroaching plants. :)

About 6 years ago we let our lawn die off (it was at it's EOL anyway; the soil beneath was sand). We replaced part of it with rough pavers spaced 2-3 inches apart and we let the grass and whatever else grow in the spaces, and keep it mowed. It's not as nice as a lawn, but it's greenery. I do have to water it, but it takes a tiny fraction of the amount a lawn would take. The hypothesis is that the pavers prevent evaporation, trapping the moisture in the soil.

I was inspired by the hearty, unwanted plants that would always manage to grow between the pavers with zero water.

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