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California blackout threat

From: Reuters
By Bernie Woodall And Leonard Anderson in Los Angeles and San Francisco

July 26, 2006


CALIFORNIA has sweltered under record-breaking, 50-plus temperatures again, pushing up the heat-related death toll and straining the state's power grid.
With temperatures soaring as high as 51.6C in parts of the state since Sunday, about 50 deaths have been blamed on the heat, but the actual death toll remained uncertain.

Most victims were elderly people living in California's central valley, which was under its fifth straight day of excessive heat warnings.

Weather forecasters expected a slight cooling trend in the next few days.

"This is a historic heat wave," Joe Desmond, undersecretary of energy affairs for the California Resources Agency, said.

Mr Desmond said this was the first time in 57 years that both Northern and Southern California had endured record-breaking heat at the same time.

About 66,000 homes and businesses were without power yesterday in scattered outages resulting from neighbourhood transformers blowing rather than key infrastructure failing.

The Fresno County Coroner said today so many bodies had arrived in the past few days that she could not give an accurate figure for heat-related deaths.

"We cannot keep up. We have had an incredible influx in the last few days. We have capacity for 50 and we have no room for anyone else," Coroner Loralee Cervantes told Reuters.

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