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The hottest July on record? Not in delaware.

This July is on track to be the hottest month on Earth since records began in 1880. But Delaware isn't there yet, according to National Weather Service officials.

Picture: Santiago Torres, 1.5-years-old in 1978, isn't really watering the sidewalk at Pleasant and Harrison streets in Wilmington. He's merely trying to keep cool.

This average temperature in Wilmington in July will be about 79.8 degrees — tied for the sixth hottest July and three degrees higher than the monthly average.

The hottest July in Wilmington was in 1955 with an average temperature of 81.2 degrees.

During a nine-day heatwave, the Sussex County Prison's warden let the prisoners in the yard for an hour in the evening to cool off.

It was so hot that month, a judge in Southern Delaware even gave the jury and state police permission to take off their coats and loosen their collars.

Later, in a second heatwave, poultry farmers in Salisbury lost thousands of chickens to heat exhaustion or starvation from not wanting to eat.

This July, heatwaves have seared much of the Northeast. Mayors in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., declared states of emergency, and at least sixth deaths have been attributed to the heat.

Picture: Children play with a hose on West 34th Street in Wilmington on July 21.

Such extreme heat is a calling card of human-caused climate change: "Climate change made such a record hot month 'far more likely,'" Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann said in an email to USA TODAY.

Picture: Sun reflects on an egg in a parking lot at Prices Corner in 1993.

The previous hottest month was July 2017.

Picture: Temperatures in Los Angeles broke records in 2017. Children cooled off at a large fountain downtown during a major heatwave.

"We are seeing multiple episodes of record heat in a given summer," said Mann at Penn State. "By mid-century, we will simply call these episodes ‘summer.'"

Here's a look back at how Delaware has survived the heat in years past. As the world warms, scientists say there will be more – and hotter – heat waves.

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