PORTLAND, Ore. — Before the first batch of Nutella and sea salt doughnuts was sold on Fremont Street on Wednesday morning, Brianna Gneckow posed a question to her co-workers at Pip's Original Doughnuts: "Does everybody have water?" But by lunch, hours before Portland endured a record high of 103 degrees, the staff had switched off the fryer and locked the doors.
Portland, of all places, was just too hot. As the Pacific Northwest sweated and wilted in the grip of one of the fiercest heat waves ever recorded in this region, Portland shattered its Aug. 2 record of 96 degrees but fell short of the all-time mark. A 78-year-old record in Salem, the Oregon capital, fell on a day when the city hit 106 degrees. Thermometers in Seattle, a three-hour drive from Portland, also broke a record, topping out at 91.
Here in Oregon's largest city, it was sometimes hard to tell what was more startling: the record-threatening heat or the fact that, on a planet getting used to higher temperatures, Portland was not entirely unprepared for it. In a region known for its enviously mild, low-humidity summers, people have increasingly and quietly embraced air-conditioning. Federal data suggests that about 70 percent of the Portland area's occupied homes and apartments have at least some air-conditioning, up from 44 percent in 2002.
"It would have exacerbated our situation tremendously if people had not been adding air-conditioning units to their homes," Carmen Merlo, the director of the city's emergency management bureau, said in an interview at Portland's Emergency Coordination Center.
Of course, the mightiest air-conditioners could only do so much to overcome the effects of the high pressure ridge that settled over the Northwest.
Commuter rail service was suspended for part of the week, and transit officials ordered light rail trains slowed. The county government opened board-game-stocked, pet-friendly cooling centers on Tuesday and said they would operate until at least Monday. Downtown Portland's street vendors urged customers waiting for fried rice to stand in the shade. And as the highest temperatures approached, Portland's streets seemed a little emptier, and breezes felt like bursts from a hair dryer.
"This is intense," Kevin Nelson said as he stood alongside the Willamette River and bought a bottle of water for $1 from Emya Hall, 10, an aspiring singer who was raising money to travel to a talent showcase in California. On Wednesday, she sold three bottles in about three minutes.
"Usually I can run in heat, but this is tough," said Nelson, who had cut his route in half and doubled back to buy water. "You know what happens in Portland? When it's cold, everyone wants heat. And then one week of heat is like the apocalypse for people, and they want to go back to cold weather."
The area has a sporadic history with sustained heat, including in 2009, when the airport weather station recorded temperatures of at least 90 degrees for 10 consecutive days. But scientists expect more heat waves like the one here this week as the planet grows hotter. They also say that climate change probably made this week's weather more unpleasant.
"If you could wind the clock back 100 years and we hadn't been emitting greenhouse gases for those 100 years, we could still be having a heat wave right now," said Philip W. Mote, the director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University. "It's just that the high temperatures, instead of being 105, 106, they would be a couple of degrees lower. We'd be breaking fewer records without the greenhouse gases."
Although Portland is still renowned for its temperate summers, researchers have measured clear shifts in the area's climate. Before this week's heat, Mote said, Portland had posted eight days of daytime temperatures of 100 degrees or more since the beginning of 2010. For the whole of the 1950s and the '60s, it recorded nine.
Overnight low temperatures have also risen sharply in recent decades.
So has interest in air-conditioning, an amenity that generations of people in the Pacific Northwest proudly shunned. The evolution in attitude extends north of Portland: In 2015, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the federal government found that the prevalence of residential air-conditioning in the Seattle area had more than doubled over about 11 years. (About 89 percent of occupied housing units nationwide have at least some air-conditioning.)
Developers and landlords often include air-conditioning in the projects that are transforming this region's cityscapes, but Brent Jacobs, whose family has run a heating and air-conditioning business in Portland since the 1950s, said individual customers cited an array of reasons for their orders.
Some people, he said, moved to Oregon from warmer places where air-conditioning-controlling thermostats are just about as familiar as faucets, and demanded similar set comfort in the Pacific Northwest. Others complained that well-insulated houses trapped too much warm air. For some, there were persistent worries about how global temperatures — and those in Portland — were climbing.
"They're more excited to get an air-conditioner than a furnace," said Jacobs, whose company cleared this week's nonessential appointments to make room for emergency repairs and installations scheduled on short notice. "It's just becoming a way of life for us to be in air-conditioned spaces."
Still, hundreds of thousands of people in the Northwest still do not have air-conditioning, and they often contend that the technology is unnecessary, too expensive or too harmful to the environment. Emergency officials were particularly worried this week about whether older residents and homeless people would be able to cope with the heat.
"I'm sure people in Arizona would be laughing," said Merlo, the emergency management official. "But people are not accustomed to this kind of heat for this number of consecutive days. People have not acclimated to this weather."
Merlo's home does not have air-conditioning, and she said she was considering sleeping in the basement. Although she cited environmental concerns as her primary reason for not installing a unit, she said more weeks like this one could shift her views.
"Talk to me five years from now, after another record-setting heat wave," she said. "I might change my mind."
Other people in the region already made the change. Kristan Moeckli, a Portland native who works in commercial real estate, said she had added a window unit to her apartment in Multnomah Village, just south of downtown. Pushed into the purchase by the coming heat, she bought the air-conditioner over the weekend, claiming one of the last units at the store.
"As we were looking at the 10-day forecast on our local news and they were projecting not just 80s — 80s, I can deal with — but 90s and above for a week, I was thinking about how we wouldn't be able to cool down our apartment at night," she said. "A part of me feels a little ashamed, as a native Oregonian, that I did cave and get the air-conditioning unit, but it's kind of one those sorry, not sorry kind of things."