While the Heat Scorches, 50,000 Are Without Power

A spokesman for Con Ed, Bob McGee, said the affected area of the shut-off is bounded by Kings Highway and Ditmas Avenue on the north; Belt Parkway and the Marine Parkway Bridge on the south; East 108th Street on the east; and Flatbush Avenue on the west.

“Con Edison advises customers in the affected areas to switch off or unplug electrical appliances to avoid potential damage to the appliances when power is restored,” the utility company said in the statement.

McGee said that overhead lines supplying the area were in danger of overloading due to the heat, and that the shutdown was meant to prevent damage.

According to its power failure map, many Con Edison customers in Queens and Brooklyn could be without power until Monday morning.

“It is the third day of the heat wave, so the system is really baking at this point,” said Alfonso Quiroz, a spokesman for Con Edison.

This was the second weekend in a row that New Yorkers experienced blackouts. On July 13, a power failure plunged a stretch of the West Side of Manhattan into darkness, affecting some 73,000 customers for about three hours.

“We’ve been through this situation w ConEd time & again & they should have been better prepared — period,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said in a post on Twitter on Sunday evening. He encouraged New Yorkers to check on their neighbors and said he was deploying 200 state police, 100 generators and 50 light towers to help people affected by outages.

Emily Prevost, 32, who lives in Park Slope, said her power went out Sunday afternoon. It had yet to return by 9:30 p.m. “My AC made this really loud dying sound,” she said. “And then it started chirping like a bird. And it’s still chirping.”

While she waited for the electricity to return, she bought ice cream and tweeted at Con Edison for updates. “It was always a canned response,” she said.

PSEG Long Island had its own power failure Saturday night that left thousands without power in the Rockaways.

By Sunday night, both companies were asking customers in Brooklyn and Queens to limit the use of electrical appliances. Con Edison said it had reduced voltage by 8% in affected areas to protect equipment and maintain service as repairs were made.

“Because the heat is still so heavy today, if customers could alleviate some of the stress to the system, it would help overall,” said Elizabeth Flagler, a PSEG Long Island spokeswoman.

Quiroz said Con Edison had hit “record-high power demand” for a weekend.

De Blasio also said Sunday night that the city had sent emergency crews to aid a nursing home that was using generator power and two adult care facilities that had no power.

Fire officials said the soaring temperatures also may have contributed to a Queens fire that killed a mother and daughter.

With temperatures over 90 degrees Fahrenheit by 8 a.m., about 100 firefighters fought the heat and the flames Sunday morning as a blaze tore through a house in Richmond Hill, Queens, killing a mother and her 7-year-old daughter, and critically injuring the woman’s two teenage sons. Fire Department officials said they were investigating whether the fire was linked to the family’s air conditioner, which neighbors said was located on the first floor.

The police said Silvia Umana, 51, lived in the home with her daughter, Lupe Perez, and two sons, whom neighbors identified as Gilbert, 19, and Gabriel, 15. The younger boy escaped out a second-story window and was rescued by firefighters.

It was a tragic coda to a sweltering heat wave that began Friday, with temperatures that hovered consistently in the mid-90s. In some areas, the heat index was more than a dozen degrees higher.

New York fire officials said they had expanded emergency service crews in anticipation of a surge in calls, and since Friday had responded to more than 230 heat-related incidents, the majority involving older patients.

New York, like much of the country, has been struggling under intense heat, pushing officials in the city to declare a state of emergency. Meteorologists have issued extreme heat advisories stretching from the East Coast through the panhandle of Texas and the Midwest.

Showers and thunderstorms, and with them cooler temperatures, were expected toward the Midwest. In New York, rain — and relief from the heat — was expected Monday.

A handful of New Yorkers did emerge Sunday morning to take advantage of the relatively cooler morning temperatures, with handball and slow-pitch softball games carrying on in Brooklyn. Wilfredo Perez, 29, ran ice cubes across his hands between games at handball courts in Coney Island. “The heat doesn’t bother me,” Perez said. “It actually makes the ball bounce better.”

As the heat wave stretched into a third day, even law enforcement agencies were losing patience. The New York City Police Department said on Twitter that “Sunday has been canceled.”

New York City’s Department of Correction said it had received at least 13 heat-related complaints over the weekend. Latima Johnson, a spokeswoman for the department, was unable to say how high temperatures were inside the city’s jail facilities.

The 311 system, however, had received 162 heat-related complaints about the city’s jails, including 94 on Saturday. William Reda, a 311 spokesman, said the system does not track whether calls come from an inmate or a relative.

As part of its response to extreme temperatures, the city opened hundreds of cooling centers this weekend, including one at the Jacob A. Riis Settlement House, a community center serving Queensbridge Houses residents in Long Island City. It did not draw a huge crowd, but the people who took advantage of it, like the group assembled for a tenants association meeting, were grateful.

One bodega owner lamented his struggle to keep ice in stock, and said he had not figured out how to keep his water bottles cool.

“We stocked up on ice again last night, and after two hours today, we ran out,” said Kenny Cheng, 40, who runs a corner shop called James Market in Manhattan’s Chinatown. “People bought it all up.”

Residents without air conditioning poured into the streets. They queued up in long lines for community swimming pools, played in the water shooting from fire hydrants and sought shade wherever they could find it.

Dream Harris was among the young opportunists.

“Ice-cold water! One dollar!” Dream, 7, shouted Saturday afternoon from the corner of 152nd Street and Morningside Avenue in Harlem. Supervised by her mother, she had made $30 in an hour.

She planned to keep working until she was out of water. At that point, the plan was to dash through the sprinklers in St. Nicholas Park, pick up some more bottles and get back to work.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.