Volunteers and county employees set up cots and stacked hundreds of bottles of water in an air-conditioned cooling center in a vacant building in Portland, Oregon, one of many such places being set up as the Northwest sees another stretch of sizzling temperatures. Scorching weather also hit other parts of the country this week. The weather service said heat advisories and warnings would be in effect from the Midwest to the Northeast and mid-Atlantic through at least Friday. In Portland, tempertures neared 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius) on Wednesday and the mercury could soar past the century mark Thursday and Friday. Authorities trying to provide relief to vulnerable people are mindful of a record-shattering heat wave earlier this summer that killed hundreds in the Pacific Northwest. Read:Wildfires rage as US West grapples with heat wave, drought The high temperatures in Portland, part of a usually temperate region, would break all-time records this week if the late June heat wave had not done so already. Seattle will be cooler than Portland, with temperatures in the mid-90s, but it still has a chance to break records, and many people there, like in Oregon, don’t have air conditioning. People began coming into a 24-hour cooling center in north Portland before it opened Wednesday. The first few people in were experiencing homelessness, a population vulnerable to extreme heat. Among them was December Snedecor, who slept two nights in the same center in June when temperatures reached 116 F (47 C). She said she planned to sleep there again this week because the heat in her tent was unbearable. “I poured water over myself a lot. It was up in the teens, hundred-and-something heat. It made me dizzy. It was not good,” Snedecor said of the June heat. “I’ve just got to stay cool. I don’t want to die.” Read: Heat wave blankets US West as fires rage in several states Oregon Gov. Kate Brown has declared a state of emergency and activated an emergency operations center, citing the potential for disruptions to the power grid and transportation. Besides opening cooling centers, city and county governments are extending public library hours and waiving bus fare for those headed to cooling centers. A 24-hour statewide help line will direct callers to the nearest cooling shelter and offer safety tips. Emergency officials have sent alerts to phones, said Dan Douthit, spokesman for the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management. The back-to-back heat waves, coupled with a summer that’s been exceptionally warm and dry overall, are pummeling a region where summer highs usually drift into the 70s or 80s. Intense heat waves and a historic drought in the American West reflect climate change that is making weather more extreme. The June heat in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia killed hundreds of people and served as a wake-up call for what’s ahead in a warming world. It was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change, a detailed scientific analysis found. Even younger residents struggled with the heat in June and dreaded this week’s sweltering temperatures. Read: Study: Northwest heat wave impossible without climate change Katherine Morgan, 27, has no air conditioning in her third-floor apartment and can’t afford a window unit on the money she makes working at a bookstore and as a hostess at a brewery. She’ll have to walk to work Thursday, the day when temperatures could again soar. “All my friends and I knew that climate change was real, but it’s getting really scary because it was gradually getting hot — and it suddenly got really hot, really fast,” Morgan said.

The monstrous wildfire burning in Oregon has grown to a third the size of Rhode Island and spreads miles each day, but evacuations and property losses have been minimal compared with much smaller blazes in densely populated areas of California. The fire’s jaw-dropping size contrasted with its relatively small impact on people underscores the vastness of the American West and offers a reminder that Oregon, which is larger than Britain, is still a largely rural state, despite being known mostly for its largest city, Portland. The 476-square-mile (1,210-square-kilometer) Bootleg Fire is burning 300 miles (483 kilometers) southeast of Portland in and around the Fremont-Winema National Forest, a vast expanse of old-growth forest, lakes and wildlife refuges. If the fire were in densely populated parts of California, “it would have destroyed thousands of homes by now,” said James Johnston, a researcher with Oregon State University’s College of Forestry who studies historical wildfires. “But it is burning in one of the more remote areas of the lower 48 states. It’s not the Bay Area out there.” Read:Huge Oregon blaze grows as wildfires burn across western US At least 2,000 homes have been evacuated at some point during the fire and another 5,000 threatened. At least 70 homes and more than 100 outbuildings have gone up in flames. Thick smoke chokes the area where residents and wildlife alike have already been dealing with months of drought and extreme heat. No one has died. Pushed by strong winds from the southwest, the fire is spreading rapidly to the north and east, advancing toward an area that’s increasingly remote. Evacuation orders on the fire’s southern edge, closer to more populous areas like Klamath Falls and Bly, have been lifted or relaxed as crews gain control. Now it’s small, unincorporated communities like Paisley and Long Creek — both with fewer than 250 people — and scattered homesteads that are in the crosshairs. “The Bootleg Fire is threatening ranch houses that are in pretty far-flung areas,” Johnston said. “There are no suburbs in that area.” But as big as the Bootleg Fire is, it’s not the biggest Oregon has seen. The fire’s current size puts it fourth on the list of the state’s largest blazes in modern times, including rangeland fires, and second on the list of infernos specifically burning in forest. These megafires usually burn until the late fall or even early winter, when rain finally puts them out. The largest forest fire in modern history was the Biscuit Fire, which torched nearly 780 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) in 2002 in the Rogue River–Siskiyou National Forest in southern Oregon and northern California. The largest fire of any type was the Long Draw Fire in 2012, which incinerated 872 square miles (2,260 square kilometers) of mostly sagebrush and rangeland in the endless expanses of southeastern Oregon, where almost no one lives. By the time the Bootleg Fire is extinguished months from now, it will likely be as big or bigger than those fires, but research shows that Oregon once experienced megafires much larger than these fairly often, Johnston said. “I think it’s important for us to take the long view of wildfire. In the context of the last couple hundreds years, the Bootleg Fire is not large,” he said. “One of the things my lab group does is reconstruct historical fires, and fires that were burning in that area in the 1600s and 1700s were just as big as the Bootleg Fire or bigger.” Read:Western wildfires threatening American Indian tribal lands That’s little reassurance for fire crews battling the current blaze, which is 25% contained. On Monday, flames forced the evacuation of a wildlife research station as firefighters had to retreat from the flames for the ninth consecutive day due to erratic and dangerous fire behavior. Sycan Marsh hosts thousands of migrating and nesting birds and is a key research station on wetland restoration in the upper reaches of the Klamath Basin. Fire pushed by winds and fueled by bone-dry conditions jumped fire-retardant containment lines and pushed up to 4 miles into new territory, authorities said. Fire crews were also rushing to corral multiple “slop fires” — patches of flames that escaped fire lines meant to contain the blaze — before they grew in size. One of those smaller fires was already nearly 4 square miles (10 square kilometers) in size. Thunderstorms with dry lightning were possible Monday as well, heightening the dangers. “We are running firefighting operations through the day and all through the night,” said Joe Hessel, incident commander. “This fire is a real challenge, and we are looking at sustained battle for the foreseeable future.” The Bootleg Fire was one of many fires burning in a dozen states, most of them in the U.S. West. Sixteen large uncontained fires burned in Oregon and Washington state alone on Monday, affecting a total of 767 square miles (1,986 square kilometers), the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center said. Extremely dry conditions and heat waves tied to climate change have made wildfires harder to fight. Climate change has made the West much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive. At the other end of Oregon, a fire in the northeast mountains grew to nearly 26 square miles (49 square kilometers). The Elbow Creek Fire that started Thursday has prompted evacuations in several small, rural communities around the Grande Ronde River about 30 miles (50 kilometers) southeast of Walla Walla, Washington. It was 10% contained. Read: Wildfires threaten homes, land across 10 Western states Natural features of the area act like a funnel for wind, feeding the flames and making them unpredictable, officials said. A complex of fires where the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho meet also grew, reaching 167 square miles (433 square kilometers). The Snake River Complex was 44% contained. The complex was made up of three fires started by lightning on July 7. Flames were chewing through a mix of grass and timber in an extremely remote area of steep terrain about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Lewiston, Idaho. And in Northern California, authorities expanded evacuations on the Tamarack Fire in Alpine County in the Sierra Nevada to include the mountain town of Mesa Vista. That fire, which exploded over the weekend and forced the cancellation of an extreme bike ride, was 36 square miles (93 square kilometers) with no containment. Thunderstorms expected to roll through Monday night could bring winds to fan the flames and lightning that could spark new ones, the National Weather Service said.

The hottest day of an unprecedented and dangerous heat wave scorched the Pacific Northwest on Monday, with temperatures obliterating records that had been set just the day before. Seattle hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42 Celsius) by evening — well above Sunday’s all-time high of 104 F (40 C). Portland, Oregon, reached 116 F (46.6 C) after hitting records of 108 F (42 C) on Saturday and 112 F (44 C) on Sunday. The temperatures were unheard of in a region better known for rain, and where June has historically been referred to as “Juneuary” for its cool drizzle. Seattle’s average high temperature in June is around 70 F (21.1 C), and fewer than half of the city’s residents have air conditioning, according to U.S. Census data. The heat forced schools and businesses to close to protect workers and guests, including some places like outdoor pools and ice cream shops where people seek relief from the heat. COVID-19 testing sites and mobile vaccination units were out of service as well. Read:No ET, no answers: Intel report is inconclusive about UFOs The Seattle Parks Department closed one indoor community pool after the air inside became too hot — leaving Stanlie James, who relocated from Arizona three weeks ago, to search for somewhere else to cool off. She doesn’t have AC at her condo, she said. “Part of the reason I moved here was not only to be near my daughter, but also to come in the summer to have relief from Arizona heat,” James said. “And I seem to have brought it with me. So I’m not real thrilled.” The heat wave was caused by what meteorologists described as a dome of high pressure over the Northwest and worsened by human-caused climate change, which is making such extreme weather events more likely and more intense. Zeke Hausfather, a scientist at the climate-data nonprofit Berkeley Earth, said Monday that the Pacific Northwest has warmed by about 3 degrees F (1.7 degrees C) in the past half-century. That means a heat wave now is about 3 degrees warmer than it would have been before — and the difference between 111 degrees and 114 is significant, especially for vulnerable populations, he noted. “In a world without climate change, this still would have been a really extreme heat wave,” Hausfather said. “This is worse than the same event would have been 50 years ago, and notably so.” The blistering heat exposed a region with infrastructure not designed for it, hinting at the greater costs of climate change to come. Blackouts were reported throughout the region as people trying to keep cool with fans and air conditioners strained the power grid. “We are not meant for this,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said of the Pacific Northwest in an interview Monday on MSNBC. “This is the beginning of a permanent emergency ... we have to tackle the source of this problem, which is climate change.” In Portland, light rail and street car service was suspended as power cables melted and electricity demand spiked. Heat-related expansion caused road pavement to buckle or pop loose in many areas, including on Interstate 5 in Seattle. Workers in tanker trucks in Seattle were hosing down drawbridges with water at least twice a day to prevent the steel from expanding in the heat and interfering with their opening and closing mechanisms. Read:UN: Don’t forget to save species while fixing global warming Democratic U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell said in a statement Monday that the heat illustrated an urgent need for the upcoming federal infrastructure package to promote clean energy, cut greenhouse gas emissions and protect people from extreme heat. “Washington state was not built for triple digit temperatures,” she said. In many cities in the region, officials opened cooling centers, including one in an Amazon meeting space in Seattle capable of holding 1,000 people. Officials also reminded residents where pools, splash pads and cooling centers were available and urged people to stay hydrated, check on their neighbors and avoid strenuous activities. The closure of school buildings halted programs such as meal services for the needy, child care and summer enrichment activities. In eastern Washington state, the Richland and Kennewick school districts paused bus service for summer school because the vehicles aren’t air-conditioned, making it unsafe for students to travel in them. Orchardists in central Washington tried to save their cherry crops from the heat, using canopies, deploying sprinklers and sending out workers in the night to pick. Alaska Airlines said it was providing “cool down vans” for its workers at Seattle-Tacoma and Portland international airports, where temperatures on the ramp can be 20 degrees higher than elsewhere. The heat wave stretched into the Canadian province of British Columbia, with the temperature in the village of Lytton reaching 115 F (46 C) Sunday afternoon, marking an all-time high recorded in Canada. In Multnomah County, Oregon, which includes Portland, nearly 60 outreach teams have worked since Friday to reach homeless people with water, electrolytes and information on keeping cool, said county spokeswoman Julie Sullivan-Springhetti. Read:Forecast: 40% chance Earth to be hotter than Paris goal soon The county had 43 emergency department and urgent care clinic visits for heat illness from Friday to Sunday. Typically, there would be just one or two, Sullivan-Springhetti said. Dr. Jennifer Vines, the Multnomah County health officer, said she believed there would be deaths from the heat wave, though how many remained to be seen. “We are worried about elderly and we are certainly worried about people with frail health, but kids can also overheat easily,” Vines said. “Even adults who are fit and healthy — in temperatures like these — have ended up in the emergency department.” The heat was heading east, where temperatures in Boise, Idaho, were expected to top 100 F (38 C) for at least seven days starting Monday.

One person was shot and killed late Saturday in Portland, Oregon, as a large caravan of President Donald Trump supporters and Black Lives Matter protesters clashed in the streets, police said.

Trisha Preston was transporting a patient in a mental health crisis in the back of her ambulance when suddenly the woman undid her seatbelt, jumped off the gurney and began attacking the veteran paramedic, punching her and pulling her hair. By the time Preston's partner wrestled the woman to the floor, Preston had a concussion and bite marks on her arms.