With Arkansas temperatures hitting triple digits again Tuesday, football practices and summer camps are changing plans to avoid the worst of the heat.
The National Weather Service has placed the entire state under a heat advisory, at a minimum, with large swaths of central and eastern Arkansas placed under a more severe extreme heat warning until Tuesday evening.
Several cities have opened cooling centers, such as Fayetteville, Little Rock and West Memphis. More information about cooling centers is available by contacting your local city or county officials.
It’s the second week in a row that the Little Rock weather service office, which covers most of the state, has issued extreme heat warnings for east and central Arkansas.
The extreme heat will affect school athletics practices, at a time when many bands and football teams are beginning to prepare for their fall competition and performance schedules.
“You’re going to have to practice early in the morning or later in the evening or indoors, just because the temperature is not going to be conductive to having outdoor activity,” said Bobby Swofford, an assistant executive director with the Arkansas Activities Association, which oversees interscholastic sports and activities for hundreds of Arkansas schools.
The association’s heat rules only apply to member schools.
The organization’s policy for acceptable practice temperatures, adopted by the association in 2019, has progressively stricter requirements the hotter it gets. It relies on wet bulb temperature readings, which takes into account humidity to simulate the human body’s ability to cool itself, and is different from the heat index. The wet bulb temperature is the lowest temperature air can reach with the evaporation of water with ambient air conditions.
The restrictions start at 82 degrees, with required rest breaks. Outdoor practices can’t be held when the wet bulb temperature is above 92 degrees.
Andy Black, executive director of Lake Nixon Summer Day Camp in Little Rock, said he and his staff routinely emphasize the importance of drinking water throughout Arkansas’ hot and humid summers, but extra precautions are taken when the weather service issues heat advisories and warnings. Coolers with ice water and Gatorade have been stocked for the week, he said.
“I remember one counselor, she was really great about this, she would always ask all her campers to put their water bottles on top of their head before they went off and hiked off to their next activity, so they made sure they had them with them and that they were ready to go,” Black said.
Certain outdoor activities, such as hikes around the camp’s lake, are limited in heat like this, Black said. Frozen snacks like popsicles — usually reserved as a Friday treat — become a daily staple to help keep campers cool.
“One of our staff members is actually a professional magician, and so we have him doing three different magic shows tomorrow,” Black said Monday evening. “We’ve got two air conditioned spaces, and we’ll be rotating groups in and out of those tomorrow as well.”
The camp hosts campers ages six to 14, with around 190 attending this week, he said.
The heat index in Clarksville and Pocahontas is expected to soar to 115 degrees Tuesday, with Little Rock expected to reach 114 and Pine Bluff 108. The weather service expected Mena would have the lowest expected heat index temperature in the state on Tuesday, at 103.
According to Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index map, Tuesday’s scorching temperatures were unlikely to occur in the absence of human-driven climate change.
Southwest Power Pool, which manages the electrical grid for parts of Arkansas and 16 other states, received an emergency order from the U.S. Department of Energy allowing it to deploy backup power to stave off possible rolling blackouts because of the heatwave, which has sent temperatures sky-high across swaths of the country.
A weak cold front will sweep through Arkansas on Wednesday, lowering temperatures and bringing some chance of rain, according to the weather service, but heat indices are still expected to hover around 100 into Saturday in many parts of the state.
When the heat index gets above 91 degrees, precautions such as going inside and increasing fluid intake should be taken to avoid issues like heat exhaustion and heat stroke, according to the Mayo Clinic.
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