Blistering Heat Shatters Records 2nd Straight Day

Searing heat broke longstanding records across Southern California and the rest of the Southwest for the second straight day Wednesday and forecasters said little relief is expected before next week.

The thermometer reached 109 degrees at the Los Angeles Civic Center on Wednesday afternoon, breaking a 14-year-old record for the date by 7 degrees and falling just 3 degrees short of the all-time record for any date, set Tuesday.

The parching heat and gusting winds generated by a massive inland high-pressure system fanned brush fires that destroyed more than 100 homes from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

About 200 passengers were bumped from their flights at Burbank Airport when the heat--which approached 110 degrees on the runways--forced airlines to lighten the loads on their planes.

Federal Aviation Administration officials explained that in very hot weather, air thins and the lifting capacity of airliners’ wings is reduced. The same problem occurred Tuesday in Phoenix, when the temperature there reached a record 122.

Power consumption, pushed to record levels on Tuesday, broke those marks again on Wednesday as millions of Southland residents tried to beat the heat by cranking up their air conditioners.

Hundreds of thousands more fled to the beaches, where temperatures were as much as 35 degrees cooler than inland.

For many, there was no escape.

“It’s terrible!” said auto mechanic Elmo Stewart, 47, as he sweltered under the hood of a car at a small, non-air-conditioned repair shop in Canoga Park. The temperature inside the garage had topped 102 by mid-morning. “It got bad pretty fast, today,” he said. “By 9:30 a.m., I was pretty well drained. I picked the wrong kind of job. Let me tell you!”

Six year-round schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District lack full air conditioning, and four of them closed early Wednesday because of the heat. The other two plan to close early today.

“They’re so hot, poor things,” Carol Marderosian, a fourth-grade teacher at Reseda Elementary School, said of her pupils. “There’s lots of nosebleeds, their stomachs hurt, their faces are red.”

Paramedics reported an unusually busy day Wednesday as they attended to scores of people, mostly elderly, complaining of dizziness and debilitation due to the heat.

“Our guys have been out almost all day,” said Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Rosco Doke, whose station is in Huntington Park. “We’ve probably received two, three times more calls than usual.”

According to meteorologists, the far-reaching heat wave is the product of a massive, high-pressure dome stationed over the Southwest like a lid on a vast Dutch oven, baking the entire landscape beneath it. The lid presses down in a process called “subsidence,” compressing and heating the air beneath it.

The crippling heat wave has been blamed for at least one death here--that of a 4-year-old boy who succumbed to heat exhaustion Tuesday after being accidentally locked in a parked car in Pacoima. Three others apparently died from the heat in Phoenix on Tuesday. On Wednesday, a 57-year-old man who had been working outdoors at his Phoenix area home died after his body temperature reached 108 degrees, officials said.

Tuesday’s downtown Los Angeles high--112--shattered a 107-year-old record for the date by 14 degrees and was the hottest temperature recorded here since the National Weather Service started keeping records 113 years ago.

The thermometer hovered for most of the night at a sweltering 92 before finally dipping to 84 at about 7 a.m.--an all-time record for the warmest minimum reading at the Civic Center. And it didn’t take long for things to start heating up again Wednesday morning. By 8 a.m. it was 94; by 9 a.m.--the peak of morning rush hour--it was 100.

As they had the evening before, cars started overheating and pulling to the shoulder of the area’s freeways during the morning commute. The problems increased in the afternoon as commuters battled even higher temperatures.

Overheated cars proved a boon to the auto rental business.

“Cars die in heat, so people rent cars,” said Iris Fox, manager of an Enterprise Rent-A-Car office in Torrance. “Many people are renting the cars because of the air conditioning--either because they don’t have it or because theirs doesn’t work that well.”

In one of their cruelest advisories ever, the California Highway Patrol suggested that motorists turn off their air conditioners, and even turn on their heaters, if their engines begin to overheat. Mechanics explained that air conditioners tend to make engines run extra hot, and that turning on the heater draws heat from the engine.

The Southern California Rapid Transit District reported a surge in bus breakdowns Wednesday. Overheated coaches were coasting to a halt throughout Los Angeles County, causing sweaty delays.

“Passengers are going to have to take it in stride,” said RTD spokesman Rick Jager.

Temperatures topped 100 across a broad swath of the Southland on Wednesday as humidity stayed low, ranging between 11% and 26% at the Civic Center.

The highest thermometer readings were in the desert--119 at Palm Springs, 118 at Blythe, 117 at Thermal and 116 at Needles.

But it didn’t make that much difference where you were--it was hot everywhere.

Readings included 112 at Ontario, 110 in Pasadena and Monrovia, 109 in San Gabriel, Santa Barbara and Woodland Hills, 108 in Northridge and Riverside, 107 in Burbank and San Bernardino, 106 in Long Beach, 104 in Anaheim, Montebello and San Juan Capistrano, 103 at El Toro and Van Nuys and 101 at Avalon, on Santa Catalina Island.

It only reached 91 Wednesday at San Diego’s Lindbergh Field, but that was enough to break the previous record high for the date of 90, set in 1976.

The Southern California Edison Co. said its 4 million customers in the Los Angeles area had used 17,647 megawatts of power by 3 p.m. Wednesday, topping Tuesday’s all-time mark by almost 700 megawatts.

“On a normal June day, we’d probably be in the 12,000 range,” SCE spokesman Paul Klein said.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s 1.3 million customers set a new record Wednesday by using 5,312 megawatts of power, according to spokeswoman Mindy Berman. That topped the previous day’s all-time record demand of 5,137 megawatts.

Both utilities reported scattered power outages during the day. SCE said about 80,000 customers lost power for varying amounts of time, but by 2 p.m., all but 400 customers had their service restored. Service to about 2,500 DWP customers was interrupted briefly in Palms, Northridge and North Hollywood.

Utility officials urged customers to leave thermostats on air conditioners in the 80-degree range and to curtail using other appliances unless absolutely necessary.

When it came to describing the heat wave, the NWS, with unaccustomed fervor, may have summarized it best in one of dozens of bulletins it issued on Wednesday:

“Very strong high pressure over the Southwestern United States will dominate the weather through the weekend, with unbelievable heat in the Southwest and in Southern California.”

According to Bill Hibbert, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times, there will be more of the same today, with highs near 105 degrees in downtown Los Angeles, dropping to about 100 on Friday.

Times staff writers Michael Connelly, Tina Griego, Berkeley Hudson, Amy Louise Kazmin, Roxana Kopetman, Josh Meyer, Janet Rae-Dupree, Louis Sahagun and Jocelyn Y. Stewart contributed to this story.

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