Summery Sizzle Prompts Escape to Places Shady

As the mercury crept up the thermometer Monday, Vicki Robert began a slow burn.

It didn’t help that the ceiling fan in her Anaheim apartment wouldn’t work. Her water was too warm for a cool-down shower. And to add insult to injury, the air conditioner in her pickup truck went kaput.

“Why today?” the 26-year-old hairstylist asked crossly, minutes after she pulled her truck under the shade of a regal pine tree in the parking lot near the Santa Ana River Lakes in Anaheim. “And I hear this is only the first day of the heat wave.”

So said weather forecasters, who predict that Monday’s temperatures, which reached the low 90s in inland Orange County, will continue through most of this week.

In Santa Ana, the temperature reached 85 degrees, compared with a normal high of 76 for this time of year, said Curtis Brack, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., which supplies weather information to The Times. At the Los Angeles Civic Center, the high Monday was 89 degrees, 13 degrees above normal.

The stifling heat is caused by a strong ridge of high pressure that extends from the Eastern Pacific region across the Southwest, into the southern Rockies, Brack said.

Temperatures today will range from the low- to mid-70s along the beaches, to 100 in the inland valleys and 110 in Palm Springs.

“In all the inland areas, it’s almost as if you’re in the desert, because there is no marine layer and if there’s little or no sea breeze under full sunshine, the temperature is basically going up as high as it can,” Brack said.

At Santa Ana River Lakes, Alex Morales pushed a button on the dashboard in his white station wagon and “91” flashed across a screen. “That’s pretty hot,” the 24-year-old forklift operator said. “That’s why we’re here. For some cool air and for the shade.”

Morales and co-worker Brian Visca were parked under the pine trees outside the lake area on their lunch break.

“We work in a warehouse and when it’s cool, it’s cool. But today, it’s like an oven in there,” said Visca, 23.

But construction workers building a gas station on Santiago Road in Villa Park didn’t have it any better working outdoors Monday.

Troy Cunningham, 34, came to work prepared. Faded blue jeans. Red cut-off T-shirt. Baseball cap and sunglasses.

“It’s not working very well,” admitted Cunningham, a Montana resident who is living in an Anaheim hotel while he works on the construction project. “So let’s step over here into the shade,” he said, getting out from under the glaring sun and into the shadow of the roof over the gas pump islands. “This is much, much better.”

The heat slowed the construction job by forcing workers to take more water breaks, Cunningham said.

“It’s either that or dehydrate,” said Duane Scott, 34, of Paramount. “It’s even hotter up there,” he added, pointing to the roof, “because of the bare steel, and the sun reflects off it like a mirror.”

Another construction worker mumbled as he climbed up the ladder: “Sure wish I was working somewhere on Coast Highway.”

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At Santa Ana River Lakes, 35-year-old Dan Connolly stood on the boat dock and checked on two fishing poles. He hadn’t caught anything in an hour. It’s the heat, he explained.

“Usually, fish bite in the morning and when it’s hot like this, they move out into the deep water,” he said. But he wasn’t complaining. “It’s a nice hot. The sky’s blue, there’s a little bit of a breeze. Sure beats being indoors.”

Try telling that to Robert, who had calmed down after a few minutes of sitting in the shade.

“I don’t think I’ll go back to my apartment until late this afternoon,” she said. “I just can’t take the heat. Just the thought of it is making me steam all over again.”