LOS ANGELES, August 30 (Xinhua) -- When people in Texas are confronting the disaster brought by tropical storm Harvey, the Southern California residents are experiencing the record breaking excessive heat on the last days of August.
The highest temperature in San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles reached 112 Fahrenheit degree (44.4 degree centigrade) on Tuesday, with over 110,000 customers of Department of Water and Power (DWP) got power outage. The National Weather Service sent the excessive heat warning again in the early Wednesday morning, suggesting people in the high temperature areas avoid of outdoor activities. The warning will remain effective in the next 9 hours, since the weather forecast predicts the hot weather will stay through the week.
With the air conditioner usage reached peak on Tuesday afternoon, about 3,500 customers left with outage in San Fernando Valley, and a few hours later the number expanded up to 100,000. The LADWP added additional crews working to fix and restore the power system through the night, until 11 a.m. Wednesday over 105,000 customers have been recovered power, according to the statement LADWP sent to Xinhua on Wednesday.
"LADWP crews will continue working around the clock throughout the heat storm to restore customers who lose power as quickly and safely as possible. In order to decrease strain on the electric grid, we urge customers to do what they can to help conserve energy," Albert Rodriguez, the spokesman of LADWP told Xinhua on Wednesday via an e-mail.
"It's terrible that you cannot turn on A/C on such a hot day, this is the second time we got outage this year. We had to live in a motel last night, since the power did not restored until 9 p.m., Misuk Park, the resident of Northridge, Los Angeles, told Xinhua on Wednesday.
This is the second time of this summer the customers in Northridge area experienced power outage. The excessive heat in July also caused a blast of DWP in Northridge, leaving over 140,000 customers without power for the whole night.
Compared with the same period of the past years, the temperature in downtown L.A area are 12-15 Fahrenheit degree (8 to 10 degree centigrade) above the normal. In the Valley, it's 15-20 Fahrenheit degree (10 to 12 degree centigrade) higher than normal, according to City News Service.
