Esmé will always remember June 26, 1990. People don't tend to forget days when their underpants literally melted due to the heat. The Valley resident was working at Sky Harbor International Airport as a wardrobe artist on a commercial shoot for the now-defunct America West Airlines.
It was a bad afternoon to be out on the tarmac. The temperature was unusually high, even for Phoenix: 120 degrees at 2 p.m. — and rising. The original plan was to film inside the air-conditioned comforts of the terminal, and Esmé had shown up wearing an all-black ensemble: a long, sleeveless black linen dress and sandals. But a last-minute change sent them outside in the blazing heat to shoot ground crews at work.
"I wound up sitting on an apple box on the tarmac for hours and hours watching them film people loading and unloading airplanes," Esmé says. "It got boring after awhile."
But as the temperature kept rising, things started to get more interesting.
"My sandals were stuck to the tarmac, and I walked right out of them," Esmé says.
She also began feeling a burning sensation on her inner thighs.
"I thought, 'Oh my gosh, that really hurts.' I went to the ladies' room and the rubber around the leg band in my underwear completely melted. Completely melted. I had to pry it off my legs. I still have scars on my inner thighs to this day."
The temperature outside would eventually reach 122 degrees, a record hasn't been broken since. It was part of a miserable, weeklong heat wave in Arizona that — in addition to baking everyone's brains and giving transplants a reason to second-guess their decision to move here — resulted in dozens of hospitalizations and at least three deaths.
Phoenix earned headlines nationwide and was the butt of quips from late-night TV talk show hosts. Valley meteorologists had a field day. Entrepreneurs made a fortune selling commemorative T-shirts within hours. Local utility Salt River Project reported sky-high power usage figures. A lot of people freaked out.
