Winter’s First Big Storm Blows Through : Mountains Get Snow, Lowlands Floods, Accidents, Mud Slides

The first major winter storm of 1987 blew into Southern California from the Gulf of Alaska on Sunday, bringing a much-needed balm of snow to mountain ski resorts--and the predictable plethora of traffic accidents, mud slides and power outages to the lowlands.

A winter storm watch was issued for Sunday night and this morning for heavy snow accompanied by gusty winds and poor visibilities in mountain areas above 4,000 feet, and travelers’ advisories were in effect for possibly heavy snow in the Owens Valley north of Big Pine.

The National Weather Service said an upper level low pressure area centered about 230 miles west of Los Angeles was moving slowly eastward, in association with a moist and unstable air mass containing numerous showers and thundershowers that should pass through coastal parts of Southern California overnight.

Advancing to Desert

A few showers could still be hanging around this morning, forecasters said, but the bulk of the storm should be moving into the desert by that time, to be followed by drier air from the northwest and mostly clear skies.

National Weather Service rainfall totals for the 24-hour period ending at 4:30 p.m. Sunday recorded 1.08 inches of rain at a measuring station in El Toro; .94 inches in Santa Ana; .53 inches in San Juan Capistrano, and .51 inches in Newport Beach.

However, according to other measuring stations monitored by the Orange County Environmental Management Agency for purposes of flood control, the heaviest rainfall pelted the Brea area, county Public Works supervisor Dave King said.

Twenty-four-hour totals at 5 p.m. showed that 2.24 inches had fallen in Brea, King said. The next-highest measurement was 1.81 inches of rain in Cypress, followed by 1.77 inches in Huntington Beach. Recordings of 1.6 inches of rain were reported in Silverado Canyon and at the Villa Park Dam, with 1.4 inches measured in Modjeska Canyon, 1.15 inches at Coto de Caza and 1.02 inches at the county station in San Juan Capistrano. All other county weather stations showed less than an inch of rain, he said.

In Fullerton, the California Highway Patrol had to close the northbound off-ramp of the Santa Ana Freeway at Magnolia Avenue when flooding reached a depth of three to four feet. About 10 vehicles were stalled in the intersection at the height of the storm, said Anaheim Fire Department battalion chief Tom Vandiver, whose agency was the first to reach the incident across its northern border.

“A lot of people were pretty inconsiderate,” Vandiver added, “They’d come through so fast that they’d create a wave that swamped some of the stalled cars.”

Flooding also forced some people to move to the second floor of their apartments, he said, and water reached “a few inches” on some ground-floor units. One person got some fun out of the situation and went canoeing in the street, he said.

However, no one had to be evacuated and the water was slowly subsiding Sunday evening, Vandiver said.

By late Sunday afternoon, .79 of an inch of rain had fallen at the Los Angeles Civic Center, according to the National Weather Service. That brought the seasonal total to 4.78 inches, slightly less than the 4.81 that would be normal for this time of year, but more than the 3.95 that had accumulated at this time last year.

As much as half an inch more could fall before the storm begins clearing out this morning, forecasters said.

Elsewhere, by late afternoon Sunday, .52 of an inch had fallen at Santa Barbara, 1.85 inches at Monrovia, 1.44 inch at Pasadena, and 1.16 at Montebello.

The California Highway Patrol blamed rain-slick pavement for a 15-car pileup in which seven people suffered minor injuries, on the northbound Hollywood Freeway at Barham Boulevard; for a 20-car pileup on the westbound San Bernardino Freeway at Holt Avenue in West Covina, and for an accident involving at least five cars on the southbound Golden State Freeway south of Pyramid Lake.

Increase in Accidents

By Sunday evening, CHP officers said they had handled 74 accidents--about six times the usual workload on a dry weekend day--on highways and freeways of Los Angeles and Orange counties.

A 21-year-old El Toro man was seriously injured early Sunday morning when the rear wheel of his motorcycle locked as he exited the Santa Ana Freeway at San Canyon Road in Irvine, a California Highway Patrol spokeswoman said.

Thomas G. Rees was slowing to about 45 m.p.h. for a sharp curve when the wheel locked, causing the motorcycle to go out of control, the spokeswoman said. His motorcycle struck the curb, tossing Rees and the machine across a small field, where he struck a fence post, breaking his hip and pelvis.

Rees was taken to Western Medical Center, where a hospital spokeswoman said he was listed in stable condition in the intensive care unit.

Another freeway accident victim, Melinda Stamper of Orange, was taken to Western Medical Center in Santa Ana after her pickup truck crashed through a guard rail on the northbound Santa Ana Freeway in Tustin and ended up overturned on the northbound Costa Mesa Freeway. Stamper, whose age was not immediately available, was listed in stable condition in the intensive care unit, a hospital spokeswoman said.

A mud slide closed the transition road from the northbound Orange Freeway to the westbound Pomona Freeway and a short stretch of Colima Canyon Road near Brea Canyon Road in the City of Industry Sunday afternoon. CHP Officer Kent Buzbee said there was about a foot of mud on the roadway, but estimated that the transition road should be open again by this morning.

In northeastern Orange County, Carbon Canyon Road was closed for a short time Sunday afternoon to allow road crews to clear a rock and mud slide, Brea Police Lt. Cliff Trimble said.

Minor flooding that occurred Sunday on many area roads and highways “happens every time it rains,” Westminster Police Sgt. Warren O’Neill said. “Unfortunately, our California streets don’t seem to be built to handle it,” O’Neill said. “But everybody’s used to it by now.”

In Placentia, 11-year-old Jose-Luis Hurtado peered out at a pool of muddy rain that crept up to the doorstep of his Melrose Street home.

The rain was pelting on the patio roof and a steady stream gushed down Center Street, past street signs warning motorists of the flooded intersection, to feed the growing pool. The rain tends to gather in the low-lying intersection, Jose-Luis said, but had never been this bad.

It started to back up early Sunday morning and was now choking out the grass and creeping under the front steps. A city worker piled sandbags on the corner to divert the flow from the Hurtado home.

“He took a stick and poked around in there,” said Jose-Luis, who watched the scene with his brother, Jose Guadalupe. But the drain wasn’t clogged, there was simply “too much water,” said the city worker, who quickly climbed back in his truck to head for another trouble spot.

Rain also contributed to scattered power outages, officials for Southern California utility companies said Sunday.

Following lightning strikes between 8:30 and 9 p.m., power was knocked out to several neighborhood blocks in Santa Ana, Huntington Beach and Midway City, according to Ken Bellis of the Southern California Edison Co.

Transformer Fails

Bellis said service was interrupted to about 300 customers, more than half the outages occuring in three Santa Ana neighborhoods. The earliest outage involved a transformer failure on Griset Street, which cut off electrical power to about 25 homes for 1 1/2 hours. Bellis said other outages could last longer, although crews were working into the night to make repairs.

In Huntington Beach, an electrical short believed caused by the rain triggered a $50,000 roof fire that cause $50,000 damage to a shopping center at Magnolia and Garfield avenues. Fire officials said lights on a walkway overhang outside an out-of-business bar were shorted out by the backed up water, sparking a fire that spread to a crawl space above the ceiling. The second-alarm fire was extinguished in about 20 minutes.

There were individual outages in southern Orange County, but no widespread power failures, said Dave Smith, a spokesman for San Diego Gas & Electric Co, which serves 45,000 customers in the south county area.

The lingering rain did not stop a parade organized by Nichiren Shoshu Soka Gakkai of America, a Buddhist lay group, from stepping off at noon in Santa Monica. There were about 3,000 participants and the same amount of onlookers, spokesmen said.

At higher elevations, in Northern and Central California, snow began falling Saturday and continued into Sunday.

“Everybody was just holding his breath yesterday that the storm was going to do the job,” said Carole Gerard of Mammoth/June Ski Resort in Mono County, in the eastern Sierra Nevada.

Some Snow for Skiers

The Sierra resorts had just passed through a devastating holiday season with little or no snow on the ground. But by late Sunday the bases on some slopes had increased from 4 to 40 inches, she said.

In the Southern California mountains, where ski resort problems have been just as serious, the weather service said the storm was expected to leave 8 to 12 inches of new snow above 4,000 feet, with 6 to 12 more inches possible above 5,000 feet.

“There’s not a lot of snow right now,” Big Bear Lake Resort Assn. spokeswoman Maggie Sanderson said Sunday. “It’s kind of slushy. But they say the rain will stop soon--it will turn to snow--and that will be the best news we could ask for.

“By this afternoon, we were already taking reservations for the middle of February!”

But the fresh snow could make driving to or from the ski areas a problem, and by Sunday night, Caltrans was requiring drivers to use snow tires or chains along a 60-mile stretch of roadway from Mono County to the Nevada state line, and in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountain ranges at all levels above 4,000 feet.

A small-craft advisory was in effect late Sunday afternoon in the inner waters from Point Vicente to the Mexican border, where winds gusted up to 25 knots.

Temperatures reached a high of 66 degrees Sunday in Santa Ana, dipping to an overnight low of 48 degrees in San Juan Capistrano. Highs from 56 to 62 were forecast for today with morning showers expected to give way to clear skies and gusty winds by the afternoon. Locally dense fog was expected in the late night hours, giving way to mostly sunny skies Tuesday.

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Gabe Fuentes in Los Angeles and Maria L. La Ganga and Nancy Wride in Orange County.

Additional photos on Page 2.