As the heat engulfed Tucson, Arizona, on Sunday afternoon, six people, part of a new mutual aid group they call Gator-Aid, were dropping seven-pound bags of Reddy Ice on the hot sidewalks and loading coolers with hundreds of bottles of water and Gatorade.

Every Sunday for the past month, the group has been bringing beverages to downtown Tucson and distributing them to those in need, they said.

“You can see how badly people need it,” one of the volunteers, Hershey Long, 35, said. “It’s great to see that people can have a bit of relief.”

Within 40 minutes, there were only four bottles of water left. A few hours later, volunteers returned with restocked supplies. They found the Tucson Fire Department treating a man with a heat-related illness. Paramedics draped wet towels over him and loaded him into an ambulance.

People across the South and the West have been scrambling to find relief over the past week, a task that could get even more daunting as a new blast of heat threatens to settle over the southwest over the coming week.

The heat wave, caused by a “heat dome” of high pressure, is now stationed over the desert southwest. Experts estimate that more than 50 million people across the US live in areas expected to have dangerous levels of heat.

A range of excessive heat warnings and heat advisories were in place across the region over the weekend. On Friday, the National Weather Service said that the conditions in Arizona were “rivalling some of the worst heat waves this area has ever seen”. Those outside an air-conditioned comfort dome had it the worst.

New York Times News Service