Thousands of residents across Southern California woke up without power Thursday after a brutal heat wave led to near record-high demand on power grids and triggered blackouts in some of the hardest hit areas of Los Angeles, Riverside and Orange counties.
Southern California Edison sustained the biggest outages Wednesday, with blackouts reportedly affecting more than 15,000 customers from Hemet and Murrieta to Compton and Baldwin Park.
A map of the outages on Edison’s website showed wide swaths of Southern California’s inland valleys affected by the outage, where temperatures are expected to climb into the upper 90s and triple digits for a third straight day.