Southern California braces for another September heat wave, with temperatures topping 100 degrees and no end in sight
Updated
As soon as the sun rises, it rises.
The same energy that makes it so hot inside is what keeps temperatures so low even as the sun rises over the ocean from the west side of the Sierra Nevada, a phenomenon known in the mountain town of Bishop, in the heart of the Los Angeles Basin, where a heat wave has left people sleeping outside and stranded hiker with blood oozing through his hand.
Sitting in the shade, Ryan Davis remembers being at his cousin’s wedding reception in the summer of 2008 when he first heard the news.
“It came out of the blue,” he says.
The heat wave was then at its hottest on record, with 95 degrees in Bishop.
Then, on September 5, 2009, the Bishop-to-Riverside region went on parched alert.
“Our record was at 97 and then 98 and now 98, 99 and now 100”, Davis says.
It was a little more than three years later, when temperatures reached their hottest in nearly 17 years, when a state of emergency was declared in August 2013.
“That was about when our record dropped below 80”, Davis says. “If you look at the years prior to that we were down in the 80s.”
Now, only three weeks shy of the official start to 2016, the heat is about to break at its hottest since 1999.
And the heat will last for another three days at least.
On Monday, the heat will hit record levels in many parts of Southern California, with the Los Angeles area about to break the 90 degree mark for the first time since 1997.
The heat also means that another September day will be nearly as hot as the hottest one ever recorded in the United States, which was 92 degrees (or even 97 Farenheit).
As a result, the National Weather Service is warning that in places such as the San Jacinto Mountains above the Colorado River and in the mountains as far north