Some 481 L.A. Department of Water and Power customers remained without power Sunday night due to outages that began the previous evening, the utility said.
Earlier, 2,600 customers were still without electricity in the morning following outages affecting 3,800 households across the San Fernando Valley around 8:30 p.m. Saturday.
The majority of households affected were in the West Hills area, LADWP’s Paola Adler told KTLA.
That evening, aerial footage from Sky5 showed about 15 to 20 blocks of the neighborhood in the dark.
The outages were not part of rolling blackouts in the area, Adler said. While the cause of the LADWP outages were unclear, excessive heat may have been a factor, the spokesperson said.
In an 8:41 a.m. update Sunday, LADWP said customers can expect repairs in 4 to 12 hours or longer.
“If you are affected by an outage, please know our crews are working as fast and safe as they can to get your power restored,” the utility said in a statement on Twitter. LADWP also advised people to conserve energy to “reduce stress on our own neighborhood power distribution equipment.”
The outages come as California experiences what may be the state’s worst heat wave in 14 years.
The following Southern California areas either tied or exceeded record temperatures on Saturday, according to the National Weather Service:
- Woodland Hills at 112 F, breaking its old record of 108 F in 1977
- Burbank at 104 F, tying its 2015 record
- Downtown L.A. at 98 F, tying its record in 1994
- Camarillo at 93 F, breaking its old record of 89 F in 2015
- UCLA at 92 F, breaking its old record of 90 F in 2003
- Oxnard at 89 F, breaking its record of 86 F in 1994
The heat wave began Friday and could last through at least Wednesday or Thursday, the Weather Service said. While areas south and west of the mountains will see temperatures drop a couple of degrees Sunday, they’ll rise again Monday through Wednesday.
L.A. and Ventura County mountains and the Antelope Valley are also under a flash flood watch late morning through mid-evening Sunday due to thunderstorms that could bring heavy rain, as well as cloud-to-ground lightning, gusty winds and small hail, forecasters said.
“Recent burn areas will be susceptible to debris flows due to the heavy rainfall,” NWS said. “Rainfall rates between a half inch and one inch are expected with thunderstorms.”
Multiple fires are currently burning across Southern California, including a wildfire in northeast L.A. County that has destroyed multiple structures and another that flared up in the hills north of Azusa in the San Gabriel Valley.
Smoke from the two fires prompted health officials to declare an air quality warning.