Rare Summer Storm Brings In Thunder, Lightning, Some Rain

If Tim Dorsey, the chief of Seal Beach lifeguards, had heard the weather report Monday night, he still would not have been prepared. The forecast was the usual: night and morning low clouds, otherwise fair.

But around 2 a.m. Tuesday, the skies began to flash and boom, jolting Dorsey to his senses.

“It was enough to wake you up, especially after being shaken out of bed twice by earthquakes,” he said. “I think everybody’s kind of living on the edge right now.”

Two quakes in one week can do that, but this time the commotion was merely a series of noisy, flashy thunderstorms that had wandered farther north than the National Weather Service had expected. Such storms in July are unusual but not unheard of in Orange County, a weather service spokesman said.

Although occasionally intense, the rainfall was scant--between .02 and .04 of an inch scattered over Orange County. Runoff was enough to muddy the surf but apparently caused no serious problems. The storm arrived from Mexico and, while continuing north, rattled windows with its thunder and knocked out a few electrical transformers with lightning. Power companies said, however, that no significant outages resulted in Orange County. A falling tree in Pico Rivera, however, knocked out power to 1,800 customers in the Los Angeles County community for two hours.

Stan Massey, a weather service specialist in Los Angeles, said the storms had been forecast for the southern deserts and mountains, where moist air from Mexico often dampens the region.

But as occasionally happens, the air was wafted farther northward, he said. Reports of sprinkles were received from as far north as Oxnard, he said.

The rain slackened and disappeared from Orange County within a few hours after sunrise, although higher-than-usual humidity remained. By mid-afternoon, the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in the normally dry Saddleback Valley was reporting 52% relative humidity.

The weather service’s forecast for today was much the same as before: widely scattered showers and thundershowers in Southern California’s mountains, in coastal and intermediate valleys, in the Mojave desert and as far north as Santa Barbara.

But the forecast for Orange County is, again, night and morning low clouds with sunny skies in the afternoon. High temperatures are expected in the upper 60s and low 70s at the coast and in the mid-70s inland.

This, the more familiar July weather, is forecast to continue through Saturday.