Orange County Sizzles in Record Heat Wave : Thousands Jam Roads to Beaches, Others Wilt at Home Without Power; San Juan Broils at 110

Orange County sweltered and Los Angeles broiled as record temperatures chased thousands to the beaches and left thousands of others helplessly wilting at home as scattered power outages cut off their air conditioning and electric fans.

Santa Ana recorded 108 degrees Sunday, well past the city’s old record for the date of 101 set in 1961, while San Juan Capistrano had a sizzling 110 degrees, believed to be the hottest Sept. 4 on record in all the county. Meanwhile downtown Los Angeles reached 110 degrees, tying the hottest Civic Center temperature ever.

“It just blasted the old (Santa Ana) record,” said Dan Bowman, meteorologist for WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times. Elsewhere in the county, El Toro reached 109, Newport 89.

“It looks like it will be another hot one tomorrow (Monday) and again Tuesday,” said WeatherData Inc. meteorologist Janice Roth. “But it looks like we are looking at some relief in the middle of the week.”

Highs today and Tuesday are expected to range from 80 at the beaches to 105 at inland Orange County, Roth said.

“The next couple of nights will be warm and a little uncomfortable,” she said. “You are going to see lows in the 60s and maybe a few low 70s . . . the farther you go inland.”

Not surprisingly, beach roads were jammed, with no available parking anywhere, observers said. Lifeguards at Newport and Huntington beaches in Orange County reported 207,000 people while guards at Zuma, Santa Monica, Redondo and Long Beach in Los Angeles County estimated a total 775,000 beach-goers.

About 1:30 p.m., gridlock brought traffic to a halt along about four miles of Pacific Coast Highway from Warner Avenue in Bolsa Chica to Golden West Street in Huntington Beach.

Newport Beach Police Lt. Tim Riley said beach crowds created greater than usual parking and traffic problems, as well as disturbance calls resulting in “alcohol-related arrests.”

It was so crowded “you could probably hop from blanket to blanket to avoid the hot sand . . . play beach blanket bingo on your way to the water,” Huntington State Beach lifeguard Jim Balok said. There were 35 to 40 rescues at the popular surfing spot and also numerous citations for drinking on the beach, lifeguards said.

As if it weren’t hot enough, about 500 Orange County firefighters fought a roaring grass fire that consumed more than 2,200 acres along the Ortega Highway inland from San Juan Capistrano. The origin of the fire was unknown.

In San Clemente, telephone lines lit up “like pinball machines” when that community suffered one of several scattered power outages, a police dispatcher said.

Tom Larimore, a spokesman for San Diego Gas & Electric Co., said power outages affected nearly 40,000 customers in south Orange County and San Diego County. In Laguna Niguel, overloaded circuits caused by customers using air conditioning resulted in a circuit automatically turning off power to 4,145 users from about 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

‘Would Just Burn Up’

“They are set at a given point that the circuit will trip off to protect themselves,” Larimore said. “Otherwise they would just burn up.”

Power in San Clemente was restored at 5 p.m. after the outage affecting 3,400 customers. A piece of equipment on a pole malfunctioned, permitting electric lines to make contact, Larimore said.

And 12,383 customers in south Mission Viejo and Laguna Hills had their power restored by late afternoon following an outage at 4 p.m. which also was caused by overloaded circuits, he said. Another 20,000 San Diego Gas & Electric customers scattered throughout San Diego County suffered power losses largely caused by winds, Larimore said.

About 1,000 Southern Calilfornia Edison customers “pretty much evenly distributed throughout the Orange County area” suffered power outages, most those due to isolated problems with transformers serving 20 to 40 customers each, according to Edison spokesman Roger Faubel.

“The system is holding up very well in the heat,” Faubel said, adding that Edison had 80 to 90 men and women in the field working to make repairs.

But not all was frantic and uncomfortable. Tustin Police Lt. Bob Schoenkopf said things were so quiet in that inland community at the midpoint of the three-day Labor Day holiday that it seems “all 45,00 people moved out of town this weekend.”

In Los Angeles, Area hospitals reported at least seven cases of heat stroke and one child with respiratory problems related to a first-stage smog alert that was declared along Los Angeles County’s southwest coast.

Hundreds of thousands who sought refuge at the beach found massive traffic jams and 90-degree readings on the sand that could only be termed cool in a relative sense.

Others never made it there; the freeways were lined with overheated vehicles. And people who stayed home with their air conditioners helped send electricity usage to a record high for a Sunday. But even that didn’t always work. Several thousand Southern California Edison customers found themselves without power when 425 transformers were knocked out.

The only other time the downtown temperature soared so high was Sept. 1, 1955.

The record for the day--100 degrees in 1984--was easily surpassed. The overnight low, too, was the warmest of any Sept. 4--80 degrees, as compared to 73 degrees in 1984. The normal high for the date is 84 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.

San Diego’s Lindbergh Field also measured a record high temperature. The airport reached 107 degrees, as compared to the previous high of 95, set in 1961.

Temperatures passed the 100-degree mark around the Los Angeles Basin, with 107 degrees in Long Beach, 108 degrees in Torrance, Burbank and Van Nuys, 109 in Northridge and 110 in Pasadena.

Today is likely to be the third day in a row with three-digit temperatures, bringing the Labor Day weekend to a blistering close, weather officials said. But “it looks like there is some relief coming. By the middle of the week, I think you’ll see a significant improvement,” said meteorologist Janice Roth.

Betty Reo, a weather service spokeswoman, said the heat wave is caused by a high-pressure system hovering over the western United States. Air is flowing from the east, instead of the usual southwest-to-northeast pattern that draws in cooler offshore air, she said.

“The temperature hasn’t dropped much in the mornings or evenings because the daytime ranges were just so high that it takes a lot longer for it to cool down,” Reo said.

Times staff writers Nieson Himmel and Esther Schrader contributed to this article.