Unit Tracking Small Fires Disabled by Lightning Bolt

More than 100 lightning bolts struck the high desert Sunday as a weather front moved through Southern California, and one of them struck an emergency communications center at Lancaster that was monitoring the rash of small brush fires touched off by the storm.

“We’re all still tingling,” said firefighter-dispatcher Jim Knight of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. “It hit our local antenna and came down and just blew us out.”

Knight said no one at the center was injured, but the lightning briefly knocked out the center’s power. The facility later resumed operating on power from a diesel generator.

Most of the fires monitored in the afternoon, Knight said, were small grass blazes, contained before they burned more than a half acre.

Widely scattered afternoon and evening thundershowers will rumble across the mountains again today, according to Earth Environment Service, a private, San Francisco-based forecasting agency.

The thundershowers are being caused by tropical moisture streaming up from Mexico and combining with intense daytime heating. As on Sunday, skies will clear quickly at night and remain sunny inland during the morning hours.

Cool low overcast and fog along the coast are predicted to keep the Los Angeles Basin seasonably mild early this week, with afternoon temperatures ranging from the mid 60s at ocean beaches to the mid 80s in the valleys.