The Heat Goes On

The calendar might show it’s Sept. 1, but Ventura County’s sultry summer weather presses on.

Southern California Edison is struggling to keep up with power demands, and the National Weather Service has extended a heat advisory until today.

“I’ve been here 17 years, and I don’t remember four [days of advisories] in a row,” said Bill Hoffer, a meteorologist with the Oxnard office of the weather service.

The heat advisory is in effect for the county’s coastal and interior valleys and warns people to curtail physical activity during the heat of the day.

Such caution would be prudent in Simi Valley, which Monday set or tied a record for the third consecutive day. The mercury there hit 104 degrees, breaking the old record of 101 in 1985.

Thousand Oaks wasn’t far behind at 103 degrees, although the National Weather Service was unable to confirm whether that too was a record.

Temperatures weren’t quite as hot along the coast, with Ventura reaching 81 degrees and Oxnard 83, well below its record of 97.

Adding a strange twist to the day’s weather, thunderstorms were reported in the Conejo and Ojai valleys late Monday and could continue today in mountain areas.

Meanwhile, with the workweek underway, Edison is pleading with customers to cut back electrical usage between noon and 5 p.m.

“We’re encouraging people to basically give their appliances the afternoon off,” said spokesman Mike Montoya, who said the punishing heat is setting new power usage records systemwide.

Thermometers are expected to edge down two or three degrees Wednesday through Friday, but the long-range forecast calls for possible record-breaking heat to return Saturday or Sunday.

“It will probably stay above normal all week,” said Jeff House, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., a private firm that provides forecasts for The Times.

Business is rising along with the temperatures for everybody from air-conditioning companies to campgrounds.

At Lake Casitas Recreation Area in the Ojai Valley, boat rentals are off but campground reservations are up, said manager Doug Ralph.

Visitors are opting to wallow in the water rather than bake atop it, he said, attributing the surge in business to a new $800,000 children’s water playground. Indeed, the recreation area is already full for the upcoming Labor Day weekend; a Los Angeles church group reserved 300 of the park’s 400 campsites.

“The heat is working out very well for us,” Ralph said. “I can’t remember filling up campgrounds like this since the early 1980s.”

But for others the heat is affecting the bottom line. In Ojai, where the temperature reached 104 Monday--down from Sunday’s blistering 107--it’s even too hot for ice cream.

“It has been kind of slow because the town is so hot,” said Lisa Severino, manager of Ojai Ice Cream. “Everybody is in an air-conditioned home or at the beach.”

Even folks who decide to forego a double scoop of chocolate-chip cookie dough may not find relief at home.

Just try finding a fan for sale at a store almost anywhere in Ventura County.

“We’ve been out of fans for a couple of days,” said a manager at a Longs Drug Store in Thousand Oaks. “All we have left are little desktop fans. All the big ones are gone.”

As for the power needed to run all those fans, the heat caused a strain on electrical circuits Monday, with isolated outages in dozens of areas affecting hundreds of customers, Montoya said. In Ventura alone, 80 service interruptions affected 576 customers, he said.

The mounting demand, termed a “heat storm” by the utility company, triggered the inception of so-called “storm centers,” where crews from as far away as Sacramento helped with emergency repairs.

“Since Saturday, just in the Ventura area, we’ve already changed out 47 transformers,” Montoya said. “That’s a lot.”

Power demand was so high that at about 4 p.m. Monday, Edison asked the county-operated Todd Road Jail near Santa Paula to switch to a generator for about three hours.

The voluntary program enables Edison to ease the demand of some of its larger customers while providing the county with rates 40% below the average, saving taxpayers about $400,000 a year, said Energy Manager David Inger.

“We were a little bit surprised it happened,” he said. “It seems like every day it’s an all-time power peak.”

Meanwhile, in Simi Valley, where every day sees another temperature peak, Virgil Aikey was congratulating himself on his choice of career: pool technician.

“We’re in high demand now, and when we get there, we’re the lifesavers,” he said. “I have lot of nice customers, so they offer me water and soda. Plus, I’m next to a pool, so I can always stick my head in the water.”