Storm Lights Up the County, but Little Damage Is Done

San Diegans awoke on the last morning of summer Tuesday to the pounding of thunder as an unusually violent lightning storm rolled and flashed across the skies, causing numerous power outages, small fires and traffic accidents.

The storm--a twice-every-15-years occurrence, based on the number of ground lightning strikes--prompted airplane pilots to change their flight paths Tuesday morning. Workers at one darkened school district building tried to perform their tasks with flashlights. They were sent home before lunch.

“Today was the last day of summer, and Mother Nature is giving us a parting shot,” said Wilbur Shigehara, meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service office in San Diego.

More rain, lightning and stormy weather are expected today--though not as severe as Tuesday’s. The National Weather Service is forecasting thunderstorms through tonight, with a 30% chance of showers and thundershowers, gradually decreasing by Thursday.

The lightning sparked the most concern Tuesday.

Bill O’Connor, chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s emergency command center south of El Cajon, said the agency’s Automatic Lightning Detection System recorded 1,840 ground strikes during the 11-hour period ending at 3 p.m. Tuesday in San Diego, Imperial and San Bernardino counties.

“A strike is maybe a tree or a pole or a rock, but it made contact with the ground somewhere,” O’Connor said. “It’s amazing we have no reports of injuries.”

Officials said they had no comparable figures on lightning strikes for a storm the size of Tuesday’s, but they did say a normal storm might make 20 ground strikes.

Escondido Especially Hard Hit

Tuesday’s lightning struck throughout San Diego County, but Escondido was particularly hard hit. Jill Kremensky, a dispatcher at the command center, produced a computer printout of a map of Southern California, with black X’s identifying each ground strike recorded during the storm.

“San Diego looks like a big black splotch,” she said. “It’s all black from the overlay of so many X marks.”

Shigehara said the storm was caused by a low-pressure system just south of San Diego, with moisture feeding in from Mexico. He said the low-pressure system has been returning to the San Diego area repeatedly over the past year, noting

that heavy rains from a three-day storm hit here exactly a year ago and that there was a freeze in January.

“It goes away and keeps coming back,” he said. “It’s cyclical. It’s caused us the coolest summer since 1975 and the cloudiest since 1973. It seems to form over Southern California. It goes away and then forms again.”

San Diego recorded 0.28 of an inch of rain at Lindbergh Field on Tuesday, bringing the total rainfall this season to 0.32 of an inch since July 1. “That’s not considered a lot,” Shigehara said, adding that the normal would be 0.30.

“But it’s deceptive when it comes all at once.”

Just One Home Struck

Shigehara said one measuring spot near Escondido recorded 37 lightning strikes. One home on Taft Place in the Mt. Helix area was struck, but no injuries were reported.

Kremensky said about 20 fire calls kept engines busy throughout the morning.

“We had them running all night,” she said. “We bumped them around because the calls came in so fast.”

She said the worst call was a half-acre grass fire in Escondido about 4:30 a.m. that was “started from lightning and soon extinguished.”

Also scrambling were crews from San Diego Gas & Electric Co., some of them office staffers who hadn’t been in the field for years.

Spokeswoman Karen Duncan said power was almost fully restored by late Tuesday afternoon to about 50,000 customers who experienced outages. She said the majority of the failures seemed to be located in Escondido.

“Most of the problems were caused by lightning strikes,” she said. “They blew transformers, and they blew fuses. Lines went down.

“We had rain, but we also had a lot of lightning. And the nature of the beast, as far as lightning goes, is that when lightning hits something, something falls down.”

Tom Baker, general manager at KGB-FM radio, said his station lost power for about half an hour during rush hour, a peak listening period. “Lightning hit a fuse or whatever and knocked us down,” he said. “This was a direct hit.”

Tamara Eulert, acting director of instructional media and services in the San Diego Unified School District, said 100 employees reported to work at the Instructional Media Center, 2441 Cardinal Lane. But the one-story warehouse, which stores much of the district’s film and audio materials and has few windows, was draped in darkness.

“They went about their work with flashlights and did their best,” Eulert said. “But along about 11 a.m., the superintendent came out and dismissed the staff.”

At the San Diego Fire Department, Craig Nielsen, computer and dispatch manager, was called in at 2 a.m. Fifteen minutes later, the department’s main computer was lost, gone for about 45 minutes. A back-up system was swung into place.

Nielsen was further frustrated knowing that four new line conditioners--purchased for several thousand dollars in the hope of helping to prevent malfunctions of the main computer--came too late. The conditioners arrived Monday, but they were installed Tuesday afternoon.

“This would have been the ultimate test,” he said. “We could have used them. But now they’re in, and I’m waiting for some new lightning to test them.”

At the San Diego Police Department, Lt. Charles Ellis of the communications unit said his office twice switched to a backup system, for a combined five minutes. “It went down at 5:17, and we rebooted at 5:21,” he said. “It went down again at 6:16, and we rebooted at 6:17. But it wasn’t a major deal. We take it down for maintenance longer than that sometimes.”

Bud McDonald, airport manager at Lindbergh Field, said that there were no problems with airport operations but that he did receive telephone complaints from about a dozen area residents. They were upset that planes had changed their flight paths because of the storm and were flying over their homes.

“When I came in at 8 a.m., there was some sporty lightning out there,” he said. “So a lot of aircraft were bending around to the south to avoid it.

“One good thing about a thunderstorm is you can go around it. But people called up and said, ‘Hey, planes never fly anywhere near my house and here three of them just flew over. What’s going on?’ ”