New York City announced additional emergency measures Wednesday to keep cool during this week's heat wave.
The city is expanding its network of cooling locations with eight additional municipal buildings, open from noon until midnight, Friday through Sunday. City buildings available to residents include the Javits Center, Manhattan’s municipal building at 1 Centre St., the city’s emergency management headquarters in Brooklyn, and the borough halls of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.
During the holiday weekend, 10 more public library branches will open as cooling centers. This includes branches in all five boroughs.
The extra precautions follow the city’s emergency heat plan announced earlier this week, ahead of the sweltering temperatures expected through the July 4 holiday weekend. According to the National Weather Service, temperatures will be above 90 degrees through Sunday. City officials say that it could feel as hot as 112 degrees Fahrenheit.
“I am asking every New Yorker to make a heat plan before the worst of this weather arrives,” Mamdani said. “The best protection against extreme heat is air conditioning. If you don’t have it at home, know now where you’ll go to stay cool.”
There are more than 500 cooling centers. To find the nearest cooling center, call 311 or go to the NYC Cooling Center Finder. The city activated more than 2,200 LinkNYC kiosks that display updated directions to the nearest cooling center within a 10-minute walk.
For outdoor workers, the city is opening seven pop-up outdoor cooling stations with water, misting fans and cooling towels.
Effective immediately, the city is extending hours at Olympic and intermediate-sized outdoor pools to 8:30 p.m., which will keep locations open an extra 1.5 hours. Open pools are free and listed on the parks department site. Spraygrounds will also be open. A full list of cooling options is available on nyc.gov/CoolItNYC.
Public beaches will continue to operate during regular hours, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. Swimming is prohibited when a lifeguard is not on duty. Firehouses will distribute free spray caps to turn fire hydrants into sprinklers.
“We have deployed every resource this city has, but our most powerful tool isn’t a forecast or a cooling center. It’s a New Yorker,” said NYC Emergency Management Commissioner Christina Farrell. “The neighbor who knocks on the door, the family member who calls to check in, the stranger who stops to help.”
To assist vulnerable New Yorkers, the city is dispatching an additional 150 outreach volunteers, bringing the response force to more than 600 people. There will be 21 outreach vans that will perform in-home checks on senior citizens. The vans will provide medical care, sunscreen, meals, hydration and transportation to cooling centers or healthcare facilities.
The city will intensify its outreach between noon and 8 p.m. Volunteers and municipal workers will canvas the streets to bring homeless New Yorkers essential supplies as well as taking them to shelters and cooling centers.
New Yorkers are encouraged to create a plan to deal with the heat and check on their neighbors. More information is available in the mayor’s public service announcement.
Roughly 500 people die each year from extreme heat in New York City, making it one of the most lethal weather-related causes of death. Last year, the health department reported 19 deaths during last year’s record-breaking June heat wave.
