107 : Heat: People throng beaches and students swelter in classrooms as searing temperatures set records around the state.

Thursday was the hottest day of the year in Los Angeles, as searing desert winds pushed temperatures to a record 107 degrees downtown.

The high at the Los Angeles Civic Center smashed the old record for the date, 101 degrees set in 1971. Thursday was the hottest day in 1991, the National Weather Service said, besting the year’s previous high of 100, set Oct. 1.

The rest of Southern California was not spared--a scorching 113-degree reading made Gillespie Field, a small airfield in the eastern San Diego suburb of El Cajon, the hottest spot in the nation.

The sweltering heat was another reminder that summer--which officially ended Sept. 23 and saw temperatures as much as 10 degrees below normal--is never really over in Southern California.

“It can still get hot here because we live in a Mediterranean climate,” said weather service forecaster Bill Hoffer. “While the rest of the country is freezing its petticoats off, temperatures here (at this time of year) can still get into the 80s and 90s.

“It’s still summer here.”

Other record temperatures set Thursday in the Southland and elsewhere included 112 in Monrovia, 109 in Long Beach, 108 in San Gabriel, 107 in Anaheim, 106 in Riverside, 101 in Bakersfield, 100 in Sacramento, 99 in Fresno, 96 in San Francisco and 102 in Redding. The high of 92 in San Diego equalled the city’s 20-year-old record for the date.

But you didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the Santa Anas were blowing.

Lifeguard officials at Los Angeles County beaches, who normally have 10 to 14 lifeguards working the beaches on a weekday in October, had to scramble to find another 20 to handle beach crowds approaching 200,000 on the sands between Marina del Rey and Topanga.

“Business has picked up,” said Dan Cromp, operations lieutenant at Santa Monica lifeguard headquarters. “It’s a good weekday summer crowd and here we are supposed to be going into winter.”

Among the sunbathers was Terry Ramirez, 19, of El Monte, who works the graveyard shift as a payment processor for Bank of America.

“It’s too hot at my house and I can’t sleep, so I have to come to the beach to stay cool. We don’t have any air conditioning at home,” she said.

But at Ocean View Elementary School in Whittier, the name didn’t help the students beat the heat.

“It was really too hot to do anything,” said 8-year-old Alexandra Magnuson, a fourth-grader at Ocean View. “We don’t even have air conditioning in our classroom . . . just a fan.”

Some parents packed the youngsters off to school with 32-ounce squeeze bottles filled with ice water or just plain ice.

“Some kids won’t leave home without them,” one mother said.

In Orange County, the hot weather created miserable conditions inside many classrooms, but school officials said they could not dismiss classes early since they did not notify parents 24 hours in advance.

Instead, 14 schools that do not have total air conditioning will be dismissed early today, said Diane Thomas, a spokeswoman for the Santa Ana Unified School District.

At Disneyland, many visitors shunned popular rides to stay in the shade of souvenir stands and restaurants along Main Street.

“We aren’t used to this kind of heat,” said Mary Sandford of Newcastle, England.

In Ventura County, chilly winds and blowing sand kept most people away from the beaches despite clear skies and temperatures in the inland valleys that hit 103 degrees.

Electricity use was near record levels in Greater Los Angeles. San Diego Gas & Electric Co. officials said a record demand of 3,057 megawatts was set, surpassing the old mark of 3,047 megawatts on Sept. 11, 1990. A megawatt serves about 1,000 customers.

Forecasters said the record temperatures were caused by dry Santa Ana winds from a high-pressure system over Idaho and Utah.

The high-pressure system, cutting down the normal marine winds that blow in from the Pacific, and a cloudless sky over Southern California combined to send the daytime temperatures soaring, said meteorologist Stephanie Hunter of WeatherData Inc., which provides weather data to The Times.

The record heat wave, however, may ebb by this afternoon.

Forecasters said a frontal system from the Gulf of Alaska should force the high-pressure system further east, allowing the cooler ocean winds to return to the Southland. Temperatures should fall into the 80s by Saturday.

“It’ll be cooling down by the end of the week,” Hunter said,” but it’ll still be warm.”

Contributing to this story were Mathis Chazanov in Los Angeles, Davan Maharaj in Anaheim and Joanna M. Miller in Ventura.