"The Morning Call Inc., Copyright 2002"
Date: SATURDAY, July 25, 1987
WEATHERMAN FORECASTS LITTLE RELIEF FROM HEAT WAVE
by TERRY MUTCHLER, The Morning Call
It's all Steve Porter's fault.
He has a sunshine switch. And at his National Weather Service office at the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton Airport yesterday, the switch's red light was on and the white numbers were clicking away.
''Yeah, when I want sunshine, I just flip the switch,'' he said with a broad smile, joking about why the Lehigh Valley has been paralyzed by heat recently.
Porter, the official in charge at the Weather Service, explained that the gauge - actually called a sunshine switch - measures the amount of solar radiation people will be able to get for their solar-powered items. He said the sunshine switch makes youngsters wonder if he really controls the weather when he shows them the machine.
While kids may think of Porter and his colleagues at the service as wizards of weather, not even magic is going to cool things off substantially in the next few days.
The unbearable heat wave this week has prompted Lehigh Valley residents to take cool cover and religiously watch the weather reports for the closest sign of relief, which meteorologist Charles Giannetta said won't come soon.
Today's forecast is no different from the day before or the day before that - sunny, hot and humid, highs in the lower 90s.
''The next couple of days are going to be hot,''
Giannetta said. ''The temperatures will drop into the 80s on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, if you want to call that relief.''
Porter said yesterday marked the sixth straight day that the mercury has risen above the 90-degree mark.
''The record is 20 consecutive days of up above 90-degree weather,'' he said. That happened in July 1955 and July 1966.
''Even though it's a very warm month, it's not near the record,'' he said.
In terms of degrees, no records were broken. But for kilowatt hours, it was a tie game.
Bob Boyle, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Power and Light Co., said customers yesterday tied the summer peak for using electric.
''They used 2,650,000 kilowatt-hours in one hour, between 2-3 p.m,'' he said. ''There was some threat all day of asking our customers to cut back, but we didn't.''
Its fellow utility, Metropolitan Edison Co., wasn't as lucky.
Don Gable, a Met-Ed spokesman, said his company requested its customers ''to be a little conservative as best they could.''
''The basic idea behind it,'' he said, ''is that it helps the customer. We have to purchase a lot of power and it's very expensive.
''We have to buy it from other companies generating it in the Midwest,'' he said. ''But we have had to buy farther and farther away because the heat wave covered a big area.''
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"WEATHER BY GIANNETTA"