HELL ON EARTH: THE DAY IT HIT 133 DEGREES ALONG THE COAST.

Byline: Jeremy Bagott

IT'S June weather again in Southern California, but picture this: The day starts out unusually cool, in the 70s at 10 a.m. Then, without warning, a highly compacted air mass descends on the San Fernando Valley from the east, a rare wind condition known in Arabic as a simoom, wind of poison.

In a matter of 30 minutes, temperatures soar to surreal levels - 110, 120, 125, 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Burbank's 113-degree record high of 1971 is quickly reduced to a fond memory.

Mass power outages ensue as the supercharged miasma fills the Valley basin. The steel and glass skyscrapers of Warner Center become convection ovens in the absence of air conditioning, as do most other dwellings. All business is halted and workers sent home.

Unaccustomed to driving in heat unmatched by a Moroccan road race, drivers allow their cars to overheat by using their air conditioners when they should be opening their heaters to cool their engines. Cars spared from overheating are disabled by a heated fuel condition known as vapor lock. Freeways and surface streets become impassible.

In Van Nuys and Sylmar, reports confirm Dante-esque highs of between 131 and 133 degrees.

Schoolchildren, the lucky ones, are rescued with garden hoses and buckets of water by quick-thinking teachers.

Thousands of people, the young, the old, the infirm, or just people in the wrong place, perish. For five terrifying, lethal hours, the Valley endures a trial by heat and wind the likes of which has never been seen in the Southland before.

Unfortunately, the only thing crazy about the preceding scenario is the last assertion. This has been seen here before.

Consigned largely to the dust heap of obscure meteorological events, the Great Santa Barbara/Ventura Simoom of June 17, 1859, was as awesome as it was deadly. And whatever rare pressure gradients were present that June day in the year John Brown raided Harpers Ferry could recur elsewhere in the Southland tomorrow.

Accounts from the day of the Santa Barbara Simoom indicate a cool, clear day by midmorning on June 17. Only at noon was anything unusual noticed as the temperature along the coast climbed to 100.

A U.S. Coast Survey engineering team happened to be in a boat off the central coast the day of the foul wind and made the official temperature observations.

As the mercury topped out at 133 around 2 p.m., cattle dropped in their tracks. Birds fell dead in midflight. Three full hours of 130-plus temperatures left all vegetation scorched. Fruit dropped from seared trees in orchards while crops literally baked in the fields.

Animals of the two-legged variety saved themselves by seeking shelter in the thick adobe dwellings of that era. Said a Coast Survey report published 10 years later: ``No human being could stand such heat out of doors.''

One account had dead animals lying around as far as the eye could see.

Seeking insight, I put in a call to the Furnace Creek ranger station in Death Valley. Furnace Creek, once called Greenland Ranch, is the site of the 1913 North American record high of 134, just one degree above the high recorded off Santa Barbara and just 3 degrees below the world's highest recorded temperature of 136, recorded in El Azizia, Libya, in 1922.

I run my scenario by Ranger Alan Van Valkenburg, who has been at Death Valley for the past six years. Although Van Valkenburg has never heard of the Great Santa Barbara Simoom, he is well-acquainted with highly compressed air masses created by extreme pressure gradients.

I am reminded that snow-eating chinook winds, blowing warm off the Rockies, have accounted for surges in temperature of 40 to 50 degrees inside a few minutes. But there's one big difference between simoom and chinook: The latter occupies the lower to middle range of the temperature spectrum. The simoom blows right out of hell's gaping maw.

Van Valkenburg tells me he's seen ravens panting like dogs at temperatures above 120.

``The tissue around your eyes begins to ache,'' says Van Valkenburg. ``Breathing becomes painful and it feels like you're standing in front of a broiler.''

A colleague of Van Valkenburg's, Ranger Marian O'Dea, has been at the park off and on since the 1970s and has endured several days at 127 degrees, which she talks about with all the fondness of a POW recalling captivity. Very few humans will ever know a 127-degree day.

And the accounts of birds dropping dead in midflight? Van Valkenburg reads me a quote by Oscar Denton, caretaker of Greenland Ranch during the record day in 1913:

``It was so hot that swallows in full flight fell to the earth dead. When I went out to read the thermometer with a wet Turkish towel on my head, it was dry before I returned.''

I contact the city of Los Angeles' Office for Emergency Management to learn what contingencies might be on the books to handle such a freak event in the L.A. area.

Each time I call the number listed in the phone book, an automatic system shunts me into the same person's voice mail, a bloke named Bob Cantill or Cantrell. ``If you need to page me in an emergency,'' says his recording, ``you'll know what to do.''

When I call the city's general information line to get his address so I can send him a letter, no one there has heard of the Office for Emergency Management.

Let's hope it's a dry heat.

MEMO: Jeremy Bagott is on the Daily News staff.