How to lick the heat: Chillin' for a cause

WHEN THE SUN is beating down, pushing temperatures into the mid-90s and threatening worse, what's a better place to cool off than under a tent at Penn's Landing, eating ice cream?

Some 20,000 people agreed with that heat-beating recipe over the holiday weekend, sacrificing their waistlines for an all-you-can-eat ice-cream event that raised close to $100,000 for pediatric leukemia research at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

The rest of the week will not be so pleasant - more heat, possibly topping 100 degrees, increased humidity - and no ice cream.

The National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning yesterday for Philadelphia and nine surrounding counties in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.

Mid-afternoon temperatures could reach a record 100 degrees both today and tomorrow, the weather service says, creating the most serious local heat wave since Philadelphia recorded back-to-back highs of 100 and 101 in the second week of August 2001.

The forecasters advised the public to reduce their time outdoors, seek out air conditioning, check on elderly friends and neighbors and make sure pets get plenty of water.

Temperatures were expected to moderate slightly Thursday and Friday, but the weather will remain hot and humid, with highs in the 90s, until a minor cold front drifts in from the northwest sometime next weekend, bringing a chance of showers or thunderstorms.

"It's the same high pressure that brought us comfortable weather last week, with an air flow out of the north, but now it's pumping in heat from the southeastern part of the country," said Tom Kines, a senior meteorologist at Accu-Weather in State College.

Remember the record snowstorms that dumped six feet of snow on the city and the suburbs last winter?

Scientists don't fully understand the relationships, but the snowy winter and the red-hot summer are both associated with the warming of surface water in the Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as El Nino, documented last year.

And a third shoe may be ready to drop later this summer and fall: warmer than normal temperatures in the North Atlantic, likely to bring more hurricanes.

But why worry about the weather with the top ice-cream makers in the region and the nation offering all you can eat?

It was the 12th consecutive year for the "Super Scooper" event, first put together by Jeffrey and Michele Kahan, of Voorhees, N.J., after their son Joshua died in 1997, just shy of his third birthday.

Joshua loved fire engines, ice cream and wearing a baseball cap backward.

Since his death, the Joshua Kahan Fund has raised more than $1.5 million to endow a Children's Hospital of Philadelphia research chair focused on childhood leukemia.

More than 400 volunteers, mostly family and friends, manned three days of shifts spooning ice cream and water ice into paper cups.

Ice-cream makers including Bassetts, Turkey Hill, Jack & Jill, Philadelphia Water Ice Factory, Breyers, Ben & Jerry's, Haagen-Dazs, Starbucks and Edy's all contributed their products without charge.

The bulk of the ice cream was kept in two 50-foot refrigerator trucks, provided by J & J Snack Foods and NFI Freight, keeping it so cold, below zero degrees, that it had to be shifted onto dry ice to begin to soften for serving, Jeffrey Kahan said.

After that, Kahan said, there was just one way to handle the heat and the hungry crowds: "We just scoop it faster."