First Responders Battle to Stay Cool In Hot Weather

Friday was the hottest day of 2010 in St. Louis, with the thermometer hitting 97, and heat indexes pushing 110 degrees across the area. Emergency crews in the city were scrambling much of the day.

At Fire Station 21 in Midtown, the ambulance left on a run at about 1pm, and was still gone five hours later, continuously receiving calls before it could get back.

Fire crews out of the same station were busy as well. For them, there is the heat, the fires they're responding to, and the gear they need to fight those fires.


"It's treacherous," Captain John Fischer told us. "Especially with this heat, your putting on all this clothing, especially that extra seventy pounds. It just wears on you."

On top of that, so many firefighters are so single-minded in doing their job, saving a person's home or saving them, that they simply don't want to stop when they should.

"It's tough to do," Fischer says. "That's why usually you have to make them take a break. Because we've got guys who refuse to take a break no matter how hot it is or what's going on so you've gotta pull them aside and say you've got to take a break. You don't have any choice."

In neighborhoods around the city, postal carriers do what they can to keep an eye on elderly residents along the way. There are tell tale signs of trouble according to Annie Jackson.

"If I see the mail is sitting in the box I know to alert neighbors or makes sure everything is okay. "

In more than twenty years with the post office, she says checking on people while dropping off their mail has become more and more important.

"I'm almost like a standard person in the area and I check on people. It's almost like…neighbors used to check on each other a lot more than they do now. So that kind of is a thing of the past so they look to me almost to be that person that looks out for them, and I do."

Of course the constant in all this heat is the fact the world doesn't stop. Work crews still have jobs to do, many of them outside, and they keep doing them.

Bob Dixon says the key is mental.

What you gotta do is drink a lot of water, man, and try not to think so much about the heat. You know it's there. Keep your towel on your head and go through it man. You gotta work.