A
fire late Saturday at a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power
facility forced officials to cut off power to about 140,000 city
residents, leaving them without air-conditioning for roughly 12 hours
during a record-breaking heat wave.
The
fire, which broke out at a receiving station in the northern Los
Angeles neighborhood of Northridge., burned intensely on and around
high-voltage equipment, said Brian Humphrey, a spokesman for the Los
Angeles Fire Department.
Columns
of smoke billowed over the San Fernando Valley as firefighters worked
for about two hours to extinguish the blaze, he said.
The
fire left grid operators with no choice but to shut down power so that
crews could safely put out the flames. Officials said in a statement on
Saturday that the energy transmission system in the northern part of the
city “was significantly disrupted by the fire and subsequent outage.”
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Once
the blaze was extinguished, crews worked through the night to restore
power; service was restored across the affected parts of the city
between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. on Sunday, the Los Angeles Department of Water
said in a statement. The utility said the outage began at roughly 6:55
p.m. the night before.
The
power outage could scarcely have come at a worse time for Angelenos,
who have been suffering for days in a heat wave that reached new highs
on Saturday.
Curt Kaplan, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service
in Oxnard, Calif., said downtown Los Angeles recorded a temperature of
98 degrees on Saturday, breaking a record of 95 degrees for the day that
was set in 1886. Elsewhere, decades-old records were nearly broken;
Woodland Hills, a Los Angeles neighborhood near where the fire broke
out, reached 112 degrees, tying a record from 1985.
Some miserable residents took to Twitter to vent their frustration, using the hashtag #LAHeat.
“Every person we contact is complaining,” Mr. Humphrey said.
The
high temperatures have contributed to about a dozen fires that are
raging across California, officials and experts said. The largest is the
19,000-acre Alamo fire in San Luis Obispo County, which is only 10
percent contained, said Lynnette Round, a spokeswoman for the California
Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Another fire, in Butte County in Northern California, has forced some mandatory evacuations, according to the department.
California
was drenched with rain this winter after suffering through years of
drought. Weather and fire experts said the precipitation left behind
brush and foliage that now makes it easier for fires to spread quickly.
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