Americans across the South and Midwest were hopeful that the weekend would bring some relief from brutal temperatures that have killed more than three dozen people and set records for air-conditioning power demand, according AP. Forecasters expected temperatures in Memphis and other parts of the Mississippi Valley on Friday to drop slightly, into the 90s (30s Celsius), a relief from several consecutive hotter days. In Tennessee, the Shelby County medical examiner's office confirmed Friday that heat caused the death of a 77-year-old woman found in her home the day before, bringing the death toll in Memphis alone to nine. In all, 41 deaths in the South and Midwest have been confirmed as heat-related, and other deaths are suspected, authorities said. The Tennessee Valley Authority, America's largest public utility, shut down one of three units at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Athens, Alabama, on Thursday because water drawn from the Tennessee River was exceeding a 90-degree (32 Celsius) average over 24 hours. Operators also scaled back operations 25 percent at the plant's other two reactors for a while Thursday. «We don't believe we've ever shut down a nuclear unit because of river temperature,» said John Moulton, spokesman for the Knoxville, Tennessee-based utility. Ken Clark, a spokesman with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said such shutdowns were rare but had occurred elsewhere. The shutdown posed no safety threat, but it came as TVA hit records for power consumption in the last two weeks in its service area covering most of Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. The utility will compensate for the loss of power by buying it elsewhere. In north-central Arkansas, the temperature reached 112 degrees (44 Celsius) on Wednesday in a place called Evening Shade. Emergency physicians warned that days of heat-related stress can lead to problems such as nausea, dizziness, headaches, cramps and vomiting for people who otherwise are healthy. Those symptoms are the first signs of heat exhaustion.
