anchorage gets its first heat alerts

And the number that sets one off might surprise you.

Starting now, the weather service will put out heat advisories for Anchorage and the areas around us, something it's honestly never done here before. Turns out our local office was the very last one in the whole country to start doing it. Everywhere else already had them.

So what counts as hot enough up here? For Anchorage, the alert kicks in when we hit seventy-five degrees for two days in a row. Down in places like Texas, they don't bother until it's a hundred and five. We're built a little different, and so are our houses.

And that's the real reason behind it. Most of us don't have air conditioning, our homes are made to trap heat and hold onto it, and the summer sun sits on us for hours. So seventy-five here can wear you down in a way it just wouldn't down south.

It doesn't happen often, to be fair. Anchorage has hit that two-day mark about sixty-six times since 1952, and more than half of those have come since the year 2000. Our hottest day ever was ninety degrees, back in July of 2019.