Packing a Punch, Rain Drops In for Another Visit

Flash-flood watches remained in effect -- especially in the burn areas -- Monday night as a powerful Alaska storm made its second pass over Southern California, pummeling the region with heavy rain, walnut-size hail, erratic winds, thunder and lightning.

The rain was expected to continue falling off and on through this afternoon, with a possibility of gusty winds and even small tornadoes.

A mudslide and flooding closed both directions of Interstate 5, the state’s principal north-south highway, at the Grapevine late into the evening Monday. Traffic was backed up for miles as motorists were diverted onto alternate routes. The California Highway Patrol said it was not known when the freeway would reopen.

Mudflows led Burbank fire officials to order a brief evacuation late Monday afternoon along Country Club Drive, below a recently burned hillside. Residents returned to their homes after it was determined that no major hazard existed.

David Leininger, forestry chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, said that the ground generally wasn’t saturated in the Burbank and Topanga Canyon burn areas, and large-scale flooding did not appear imminent. “But the potential is there,” he said. “A heavy downpour could bring some soil movement.”

The Los Angeles Police Department was on tactical alert Monday afternoon to deal with possible emergencies. An alert means that officers can be kept on duty past the end of their normal shifts.

Heavy downpours snarled traffic and apparently contributed to the crash of a gasoline tanker-truck Monday on Interstate 5 in Glendale, killing the driver. The weather knocked out power to about 137,000 customers in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, but most of the outages were brief.

The U.S. Forest Service said lightning started two small blazes in Angeles National Forest, but both were extinguished without difficulty.

“The fire danger is still high,” said Stanton Florea, a Forest Service spokesman. “The rain helps, but it takes days, sometimes even weeks, for it to be reflected in the moisture levels of the brush.”

Reports of hail were widespread Monday afternoon, the heaviest along the San Gabriel Mountain foothills from La Crescenta to Arcadia.

Tony Rascon, 32, an employee at a Target store in east Pasadena, said he kept customers inside so they wouldn’t be pelted by hail an inch in diameter that was bouncing off cars in the parking lot.

“It sounded like a train on top of the roof,” he said. “I was briefly freaking out.”

Customer Cathy Heavelin, 52, of Rosemead said the skies were so dark in the early afternoon that when she emerged from a subterranean garage, she thought she was still underground.

“This isn’t Southern California weather,” she said.

In Ventura County, sporadic cloudbursts led to several traffic accidents, including one in which a sport-utility vehicle skidded out of control and slammed into a tree in Thousand Oaks, killing a woman passenger. Lightning ignited a palm tree beside the freeway, but a downpour extinguished the blaze.

In San Bernardino County, a California Highway Patrol officer and two other people were struck by a pickup that skidded on rain-slick Interstate 15 in the Cajon Pass. They were standing next to a car that had been involved in an accident minutes earlier.

The National Weather Service said the storm that brought all the rain and hail originated in the Gulf of Alaska.

“A lot of cold air came with it, and that leads to unstable conditions -- thunder and lightning,” said Eric Boldt, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. “The jet stream and the main storm track stayed to the north, but this storm split off and started digging southward.”

Boldt said that when the storm first passed through the Los Angeles area Saturday night, it was fairly dry and relatively little rain fell. But the storm then stalled over the ocean about 150 miles southwest of San Diego.

“As it sat there, it fueled itself, picking up moisture,” he said. “The winds around it were rotating counterclockwise, and they started slinging that moisture inland.”

Bill Patzert, a climatologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, said the same thing happened last year, when another cutoff low brought substantial rain in October.

Last year, the winter that followed was the second-wettest on record, but “there’s no guarantee we’ll have another one like that,” Patzert said.

At 5:30 p.m. Monday, the 24-hour rainfall total in downtown Los Angeles was .98 of an inch. That raised the total for the season, which runs from July 1 through June 30, to 1.32 inches. The normal season’s total through Oct. 17 is about two-thirds of an inch.

Other daily rainfall totals as of 5:30 p.m. Monday included 2.16 inches in Palmdale, 1.80 in Yorba Linda, 1.49 in Burbank, 1.38 in San Gabriel, 1.19 in Northridge, 1.10 in Palm Springs, 1.07 in Ventura, 0.81 of an inch in Ontario, 0.77 in Culver City and 0.40 in Anaheim.

Times staff writers Catherine Saillant in Ventura County and Lance Pugmire in San Bernardino County contributed to this report.