By CHRIS JONES and FRANK ANTHONY CURRERI
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

What’s worse than spending an entire afternoon stranded at the airport?

Try spending an afternoon stuck at the airport with no air conditioning on one of the hottest days in recorded history.

Tens of thousands of Southern Nevada locals and visitors experienced just such a daytime nightmare Sunday afternoon as the temperature at McCarran International Airport rose to 116 degrees at 2:58 p.m., breaking the record for July 17 of 115 degrees set in 1959, according to the National Weather Service.

The mark tied the highest reading ever recorded at McCarran, a benchmark reached eight other times, weather service meteorologist Clay Morgan said. On July 28, 1942, a 117-degree reading was taken at Nellis Air Force Base, then the official gauge. Weather service records for Las Vegas date to 1937.

At McCarran on Sunday, electrical problems forced the nation’s sixth-busiest passenger airport to go without air conditioning in its main terminal and adjacent C and D concourses for nearly four hours.

In addition, the heat outside caused an unknown number of planes to miss their scheduled departure times. Some airlines even bumped travelers so that planes could take off with lighter-than-planned payloads, a physics-related complication stemming from the extreme temperatures.

“A lot of people are feisty,” said Mario Diaz, a television anchor from Tampa, Fla., whose journey home through Houston was delayed nearly three hours Sunday. “The heat was making people miss their planes, and everybody seems pretty upset.”

Sunday marked the sixth consecutive day that valley temperatures topped 110 degrees, Morgan said. The 110-plus wave is predicted for at least the next four days. If the forecast holds, it would tie yet another local record.

The scorching temperatures also grounded some Mercy Air ambulances for six to eight hours at a time, said Brian Fladhammer, a program director for the agency.

“When you get to a certain temperature, that’s it: The aircraft will just not perform,” said Fladhammer, who was vacationing in California and had no information on how many patients might have been affected.

AMR ambulance service responded to at least eight calls Sunday involving heat-related illnesses, a dispatcher said, though the actual number of victims might have been higher because many emergency calls are reported as unknowns.

Clark County Fire Department spokesman Bob Leinbach said the agency had responded to 40 heat-related emergencies since June 1, but he had no specific figures for Sunday.

At the airport, Diaz’s Continental Airlines Flight 696 was set to leave Las Vegas at 2:49 p.m. After taxiing onto the airfield, its pilot reportedly said the jet needed to return to the gate to pick up more fuel. Once there, however, passengers said they were told to exit the plane, and ticketing agents soon announced that the flight could not depart with a full passenger load because of heat-related weight restrictions.

Matters worsened when people stepped from the air-conditioned jet into the terminal, which was without air conditioning from about 2:10 p.m. through 6 p.m., airport representatives and passengers said.

“It was like we were stuck in a glass-enclosed biosphere, surrounded by a sea of heat-reflecting concrete,” Diaz joked, referring to Biosphere 2, a 1990s science experiment based in the Arizona desert. “But at least the people in the biosphere were given air conditioning, I think.”

Nevada Power spokeswoman Sonya Headen said the problems at the airport were caused by blown fuses in an electrical transformer. She gave a conflicting account of how long power was affected at McCarran, saying it was from about 5 to 7 p.m.

“This was an incident of equipment failure, which can happen when you top 115 degrees,” Headen said.

Aside from its cooling system, McCarran’s power supply remained operational.

Thanks to heavy air-conditioning use and an influx of new residents, the local power grid on Sunday handled a record 5,458 megawatts.

Away from the airport, Headen said, the valley’s only other significant power outage Sunday affected about 500 customers in an area bordered by Washington Avenue, Lamb Boulevard, Pecos Road and Owens Avenue. Power there was lost around 4:20 p.m. and was restored about two hours later, she said.

Some disgruntled passengers at McCarran turned their boarding passes into make-shift fans; others passed time at slot machines, whose power was uninterrupted.

McCarran spokeswoman Linda Healey said temperatures such as Sunday’s affect the “lift” that aircraft can achieve when taking off. On very hot days, changes in air density require planes to travel farther on runways before they can leave the ground. As a result, planes must shed weight by reducing passenger counts or fuel loads, she explained.

“It’s definitely an issue when the temperatures are in the 112- to 115-degree range,” said Healey, who added that similar issues have plagued McCarran in past heat waves.

Melanie Jones, a spokeswoman with Dallas-based Southwest Airlines, McCarran’s busiest carrier, said Sunday’s weather made for a difficult afternoon for travelers and airline employees alike.

An unknown number of Southwest’s long-haul flights using Boeing 737-300 aircraft were affected by heat-related weight limitations, Jones said. As a result, some passengers had to be rescheduled, while other flights left with reduced fuel loads, which required unscheduled fuel stops elsewhere before continuing to their original destinations.

Jones could not say how many Southwest passengers or flights were affected Sunday, adding that airline employees were too busy assisting passengers to perform such a count.

Those relief efforts weren’t limited to rebooking travelers.

“We were bringing up pallets of (bottled) water to help keep people cool and hydrated,” Jones said. “Our goal was to try to get people out as soon as possible.”

Healey was also unable to provide a firm count for Sunday’s affected flight operations, but the heat impacted tens of thousands of travelers.

Through May, McCarran averaged nearly 119,000 arriving and departing passengers per day. But that number is typically higher on Sundays, when many visitors return home following weekend stays at local resorts.