A scorching early summer heat wave that has baked much of Texas and Oklahoma for the past week spread across the Gulf Coast on Tuesday, with dangerous heat forecasts reaching all the way to the Florida Keys.
"In the South, we’re resilient, but it still hurts,” said Kevin Ardoin, who grows watermelons on a family farm about 64 kilometers north of Lafayette, Louisiana, where the heat index — a measure of how the air feels that takes into account both temperature and humidity — had already climbed to 41 degrees Celsius before noon.
Temperatures have been brutal lately, Ardoin said as he stood under a tent in a wide-brimmed straw hat. He and his brothers cope by starting their field work early and pausing during the hottest part of the day, before going back out in the afternoon. "We definitely respect the heat, because it’s dangerous,” he said.