Eastern U.S. cooks in summer heat

? Another wave of oppressive heat clamped down on a broad swath of Eastern states on Saturday, with temperatures in the high 90s and 100s and residents scrambling for shade or just staying indoors.

In the Mid-Atlantic, already the locus for brutal temperatures several times in July, weather experts warned of the dangerous conditions and residents resigned themselves to coping with the discomfort.

“Oh, it’s disgusting. It’s already really hot,” meteorologist Heather Sheffield of the National Weather Service said of morning temperatures in Washington, D.C.

One possible weather-related death was reported in Maryland, where paramedics said the high temperatures and humidity likely played a role in the death of a 20-year-old man who was biking, went into cardiac arrest and hit his head on a tree as he fell.

With the heat and humidity combining for a possible heat index of over 110 degrees, the weather service issued an excessive heat warning for the first time this year for an area stretching from south of Washington to north of Baltimore, along the Interstate 95 corridor. By midday Saturday, a wide band from lower New England to the Deep South was under a heat advisory.

The thermometer hit 100 degrees in Washington and Baltimore by mid-afternoon, where the heat index was 109. Elsewhere, record highs for July 24 of 97 degrees in New York and Philadelphia and 99 degrees in Newark, N.J., were reported.