Shades of Hades : Winners: When you’re hot, you’re hot. But when you’ve got one of coolest jobs in town, it can be heavenly.
Sharon Corbin saw it as one of those perfect summer days: temperatures rocketing to near 110 degrees, hot Santa Ana winds, mass discomfort. As Wednesday’s heat smashed all records, Corbin cooled out in her family-owned warehouse surrounded by 200 tons of ice, stacked around her to glacial heights.
The room was a frosty 20 degrees. But Corbin, shivering in a sweat shirt, found time to rejoice.
“We’ve been backlogging ice waiting for just what’s happening--a heat wave,” said the laughing, 47-year-old owner of the Torrance-based Southern California Ice Co., a wholesaling firm that would distribute more than 90 tons of the cold stuff by nightfall. “Come Sunday, (our warehouse) will be empty,” a proud Corbin predicted. “This is an ice person’s dream--the heat.”
On a day given over to sunburns and inflamed tempers, a fortunate few in Los Angeles managed to escape the hell blast, or even to thrive on it.
Nearly 1 million residents--including more than a few who skipped work--teemed onto the beaches, according to Los Angeles County lifeguards. Others stayed inside in the jet stream of air conditioners. Hockey coach Tom Caudill was one of the lucky souls who got to savor the refreshing chill of an ice rink--and get paid for the privilege.
“It’s a dirty job, but I’m going to have to stay here and watch these kids,” quipped Caudill in the 65-degree cool of Iceland, an ice-skating rink in Paramount. As chance would have it, his summer camp for 150 young hockey players will last all week. With a grin, Caudill said, “It beats working.”
Pools and water parks attracted extraordinary crowds. By midday, nearly 700 youngsters had splashed through half-hour swim lessons at Torrance’s Victor E. Benstead Plunge, and the line for an afternoon session of recreational swimming had reached 150 feet. If anyone missed a swim lesson, lifeguards were not aware of it.
“Our attendance today has been outstanding,” pool manager Kathi Wilson said.
El Monte opened its three-pool swimming complex 45 minutes earlier and kept it open an hour longer than normal. “We’re jampacked,” said recreation services manager Gonzalo Montalvo. “A lot of people see the lines of people waiting outside the pool and they just drive off. We could sure use another swimming pool today.”
At Raging Waters in San Dimas, the usual weekday crowds had nearly doubled to 6,000 visitors, many of them crowding under waterfalls and into makeshift oceans.
“We’ve broken all records for the month of June,” spokeswoman Lynne Matallana said, describing water temperatures as, well, inviting. “I had my feet in. It feels real good.”
Claude McCaskill was one man who could go to work and keep cool. The cold-storage manager for the Los Angeles-based American Fish and Seafood Co. spent half his time in a massive, sub-zero refrigerator, wearing a heavy jacket, insulated socks and boots. “Today I am going from . . . temperatures that are below zero to temperatures in the 100s,” he said. “It is very strange.”
His preference? “I can deal with the cold,” he said.
Others, however, found escape from the scorching heat more difficult. Bus driver Greg Jones stood on a street corner in Santa Monica, eager, for the first time he could remember, to go to work. His city bus, he said, is “the coolest place in town.”
An elderly homeless woman who called herself Mimi was ducking the sunlight by toting around her five bags of belongings from air-conditioned store to air-conditioned store, just to stay cool. It was difficult. Her clothing--a winter jacket, white wool scarf and matching knit cap--hardly helped.
“The weather?” she asked. “It’s horrible. When the wind comes up, it is really bad.”
Despite late-afternoon winds that virtually sandblasted some beach-goers back toward their homes, coastal areas were the greatest refuge. More than 45,000 people who crowded onto the sand in Long Beach hardly seemed to notice the hot wind, said lifeguard Tim Murphy, who described it as “blowing like (a wind on) the Sahara Desert.”
“I’ve seen gusts up to 32 miles an hour, real hot and dry, but people aren’t taking off,” he said. “They just go in the water.”
In the South Bay, where temperatures were notably cooler than elsewhere in the county, street maintenance workers counted their blessings.
“I live in West Los Angeles and when I left there this morning it was very, very hot,” said Farid Hantabli, an analyst in Torrance’s street department. “I got out of the car here and found out it’s just beautiful outside.
“I love it.”
Times staff writers Josh Meyer, Berkley Hudson and Janet Rae-Dupree contributed to this story.
THE DAY IN PICTURES: B3