Record Heat Continues to Scorch Valley

The hottest May 21 on record foiled the ice cream run April Barnes and her two sons made on Sunday afternoon.

By the time they walked the 10 blocks back to their hotel room from the grocery store, she was holding half a gallon of lukewarm Breyer’s mush.

Temperatures reached the 100s throughout the western San Fernando Valley, breaking records for the second consecutive day. At 106 degrees, Chatsworth broke a 101-degree record set in 1967. Woodland Hills broke a 12-year-old benchmark of 102 degrees by hitting 105 in late afternoon. Burbank and Pasadena also set new highs at 94 and 99 degrees.

“I guess the sun just wouldn’t let us have ice cream,” Barnes said.

National Weather Service forecaster Bruce Rockwell said the Valley can expect near-record broilers and subsequent cool-off days monthly from now through August. Today is expected to be another scorcher, but temperatures are expected to drop back down to the 80s on Tuesday.

It’s like the Earth compensating for its hot pockets, Rockwell said.

“It’s just a few days,” he said. “Then cool ocean air will blow right back in and make it cool again.”

Record highs in the Valley, where temperatures can range 10 degrees hotter than downtown Los Angeles, are easier to come by than a record in the city, Rockwell said. The Valley extremes have been recorded for only the past 50 years, but downtown records have been kept since the 1870s.

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“Fifty years ago, the Valley was mostly agriculture and native vegetation,” said Rockwell, who moved to Los Angeles five years ago from Nome, Alaska. “I could see it [being] a couple of degrees hotter now with all the development of highways, roads and parking lots.”

Alternating hot and cool periods stymied planning for Burbank’s Mustangs softball team. Just a week ago, coach Mike Dunivant was practicing in the cool 65 degrees of the afternoon at McCambridge Park.

On Sunday, the coaches traded baseball caps for a straw variety somewhere between a Panama Jack and a sombrero.

One man in a tank-top shirt got out of his convertible Mustang and walked over to the park’s Olympic swimming pool. Finding it empty, he clung to the fence for a moment and dropped his head. He then turned and left the park.

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At the Chatsworth Car Wash, employees who worked outside filled their caps with water and sloshed them over their heads.

Some sprayed each other with water as they hosed down cars.

The heat was “very exhausting,” said Michael Gharibi, who works at the carwash on Mason Avenue near Devonshire Street. Management gave employees free ice cream and cold drinks from the snack bar, Gharibi said, to help cool off.

Hordes of people--sunbathers or heat refugees--hit the beach over the weekend. Among them was National Weather Service forecaster Bonnie Bartling, who had an inside tip that overcast skies would keep an atomized mist in the coastal regions.

Malibu enjoyed a 65-degree day, while Santa Monica’s temperature never broke 60 degrees.

Times staff writer Caitlin Liu contributed to this story.