Heat Sends O.C. Looking for Relief

Though no heat records were broken, Orange County sweltered under a late-summer sun Wednesday that pushed temperatures to uncomfortable levels in some classrooms and drew near-record crowds to local beaches.

“It’s definitely heavier than normal,” said Mark Klosterman, Laguna Beach’s marine safety chief. While the beach crowd on a weekday at this time of year normally ranges from 5,000 to 10,000, he said, as many as 18,000 people found their way to the seaside.

“It’s hot,” Klosterman said. “It’s warm and it’s muggy, and people are out and about because we’re the coolest place in the county. If this heat holds up through the weekend, we’re expecting extremely large summer-like crowds.”

Some schools dealt with the heat by shifting classes to air-conditioned rooms. One campus doing so was Valley High School in Santa Ana, Principal Robert Nelson said.

Because the school has air-conditioning in only a handful of bungalows, mostly “all we could do was operate fans. We did get our windows tinted last year, which helped some,” Nelson said, “but it’s very difficult to maintain a good learning environment when it’s hot. We try to keep the kids interested and not focused on the heat.”

The school’s physical education classes met in the gymnasium rather than outside and restricted some strenuous activities, he said. When it’s hot, Nelson said, “they try and tone it down if possible.”

Thermometers hit 100 in Irvine. In other parts of the Southland, Pasadena reported a high of 107 degrees Wednesday, making it the hottest spot in Los Angeles County, said Clint Simpson of the National Weather Service.

The high was 90 in Santa Ana, 91 in downtown Los Angeles, 100 in Woodland Hills, 105 in San Bernardino and 95 in Van Nuys.

A pair of fast-moving brush fires swept through northern Los Angeles County, blackening more than 800 acres, destroying several homes and closing two freeways.

The fires erupted within 25 minutes of each other, one roaring through dry, brush-covered ridgelines in Agua Dulce as the other burned along the Golden State Freeway north of Castaic. Hundreds of firefighters and a squadron of water-dropping planes responded.

A third brush fire consumed an unpopulated area of about 4,000 acres at Santa Barbara County’s Vandenberg Air Force Base.