“It’s so hot outside you could fry and egg on the sidewalk.”
Really?
There is no way to describe the heat that finally – after months of hiding around periodic warm spells – let herself be known to those of us Central Valley folk that will now start considering any day that doesn’t hit triple-digits to be a “bearable one.”
But was the sidewalk really so hot that it could fry an egg?
When Bulletin Executive Editor Dennis Wyatt informed me that the weather station at Manteca City Hall read that it was 108 degrees outside at 4:26 p.m. on Monday, I figured that the temperature on a concrete sidewalk has to be at least 15 degrees hotter than that when in direct sunlight.
So I did what any 12-year-old with pocket change would do and I sauntered across to the Mexican market on the corner near The Bulletin’s office and I picked up a dozen and a soda for refreshment purposes and strut back assured that my crude mathematics and my advanced thermodynamic knowledge wouldn’t let me down.
And while they didn’t quite fry, they definitely cooked.
The first egg took less than five minutes before the yolk slowly grew in size and eventually popped, forcing it to run down into the gutter and leave a weird yellow trail of half-cooked “something” as the liquid that propelled it evaporated and left an egg-colored coating behind.
I wouldn’t have eaten it, but there were signs that portions of what was left were in fact, cooked.
The second egg had thin white strands develop within the egg white almost instantly, and those grew over a slow period of time – never quite reaching full status but again showing that eggs, broken on a hot sidewalk, will begin some sort of cooking process.
This chincy experiment will produce no scientific findings and no academic follow-up. It was merely intended to show that the temperature finally does reach as hot as 108 degrees, it’s probably best to stay inside of your air conditioned home or office and not spend part of your afternoon playing in gutters in an attempt to cook a breakfast of questionable integrity.
“I think it could do it – it’s hot as sh** out here man,” noted one passerby who saw me prepping to do this. “Hell yes it’s that hot. But you ain’t going to eat them eggs when you’re done, are you?”
No sir.
Others who had to spend the entire day outside working in the heat didn’t have many good things to say about it.
“I wasn’t ready for this. I know it normally gets hotter earlier than this so that’s good but come on man – you can’t work outside when it’s this (expletive deleted) hot,” said one construction worker at a gas station who had stopped in to buy his third Gatorade of the day. “You know that it’s going to be hot but when you’re in it you’re just counting the minutes until you feel cool air again and then you start counting again until you’ve gotta be right back out in it. It’s all about counting those hours away.”
Leah Boersma said that the heat was enough for her to think that she was going to pass out when she made one of her early afternoon walks in Ripon – forcing her to find shade several times and buy water at the first place that she came to that sold it.
A lifelong Central Valley resident, Boersma said she didn’t think that the heat was going to be as bad as it was after earlier forecasts didn’t materialize.
“Once that sun starts baking on you and you don’t have any breeze there’s really nowhere to go,” she said. “I like the hot summer weather, but it caught me off guard today and I’ll have to pay more attention to that next time.”
Yes – the next time that it’s hot enough to slow-roast an egg on the blacktop.
Which looks like it might not be today since the predicted high of 94 degrees is 14 degrees cooler than Monday which, by the way, the low was 70 degrees at 5:35 a.m.
Manteca, Ripon and Lathrop are expected to flirt again with the century mark on Saturday.
To contact reporter Jason Campbell email jcampbell@mantecabulletin.com or call 209.249.3544.
