Southland Basks in Record-Tying Weather

By 8 a.m. Saturday it was 82 degrees at Zuma Beach in Malibu--and the foreign tourists were in heaven.

Furnace-like Santa Ana conditions pushed Southern California temperatures 20 degrees above normal, tying a 1956 record of 94 degrees in downtown Los Angeles and making a San Diego County town the hottest spot in the nation.

Tens of thousands of beach-goers baked on the sand, the mountains glistened as if in postcards and the chilly rains of 10 days ago seemed from another season.

“This is as good as it gets,” crowed Zuma Beach lifeguard Bill Powers. “It was just magnificent.”

About 25,000 people were at Zuma, but Powers had actually expected more. “This is what people move here for.”

It is also what they vacation here for. Powers said visitors from Germany, England and even such sunny spots as the Middle East gloried in the day. Offshore, dolphins put on an unusually spectacular show, leaping out of the glassy sea.

The scene was much the same at Santa Monica until the arrival of afternoon clouds. The surf was quiet, the ocean calm enough for floating. The view was clear to Santa Barbara Island miles away.

High temperatures reached the low- and mid-90s up and down the Southern California coast. In Poway, northeast of San Diego, the thermometer hit 98, the national high for the day, said meteorologist Mark Mulholland of WeatherData Inc., the weather monitoring service used by The Times.

The normal Los Angeles high for the date is 74 degrees. Mulholland said it should cool by 5 or 6 degrees today as the Santa Anas die out.

The heat created an unusually high demand for electricity. “We certainly don’t see consumption demands at this level in November,” said Steve Conroy, a Southern California Edison spokesman.

Although there were two power outages Saturday afternoon, neither related to the weather, utility representatives said.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said a transformer on an industrial line blew about 1:30 p.m. near Airport Boulevard and Manchester Avenue, and about 8,000 residential and commercial Edison customers in Santa Monica lost power when a bird flew into a transformer, causing a malfunction.