US heat wave sears California as St. Louis copes

LOS ANGELES, July 24 (Reuters) Californians sweltered again in a heat wave that has set records across the state and caused scattered power outages while St Louis and New York City struggled with outages that began last week.

As of yesterday afternoon, 100,000 homes and businesses were without power in California, a survey of the state's big utilities showed.

Even in usual havens from the heat like San Francisco, temperatures soared to records on the weekend with the Bay City hitting 30 degrees Celsius on Saturday. In places used to the heat, like Palm Springs and the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles, the heat wave is making history. In Woodland Hills in the valley, the temperature yesterday hit at least 37.7 degrees Celsius for the 18th straight day.

A man died, apparently from heat-related illness, after he was taken from a Stockton, California, nursing home to an area hospital. That prompted the evacuation of all 105 patients at the nursing home, according to KCBS-AM, a San Francisco Bay Area radio station.

The nursing home's air conditioner was not working, the station reported. Temperatures in Stockton reached 46 degrees Celsius yesterday.

An estimated 800,000 Californians experienced at least temporary loss of electricity during the weekend as air conditioners battled temperatures as high as 50 degrees Celsius in Palm Springs, California, and more than 43 degrees Celsius in the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles and the Central Valley east of San Francisco.

In the northern part of the state on Saturday Sacramento hit a record 42.7 degrees Celsius and 44.4 degrees Celsius readings were reported in Red Bluff, Stockton and Modesto.

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