Almost Time to Dry Out : Clearing Trend Leaves Forecaster Shigehara Melancholy

The rains were playing out. And Wilbur Shigehara sounded melancholy.

“I love the rain,” he said Wednesday afternoon, as shafts of sunlight began to slice through decreasingly cloudy skies. “The rain clears the air. It takes the dust off the leaves. It greens our lawns. But now it’s going away.”

As meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service office in San Diego, Shigehara is predicting a less than 20% chance of showers for today. And he said the lightning and thunderstorm that hit San Diego suddenly on Tuesday morning should be completely gone by Friday.

“This storm is going to gradually weaken day by day and by the weekend dry out,” he said. “Then the rain this week will be a forgotten memory.”

Welcome Trend

For others in San Diego, the clearing trend will be welcomed.

Jill Kremensky, a San Diego dispatcher for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said her office recorded only one serious lightning strike in San Diego from the storm Wednesday morning. “One strike knocked one tree down,” she said, a small number compared with hundreds of ground lightning strikes in the city Tuesday morning.

Karen Duncan, a spokeswoman for the San Diego Gas & Electric Co., said fewer than 2,000 customers suffered power outages Wednesday morning, most of them in the El Cajon and La Mesa areas. She said the lights went out shortly after 7 a.m. and were restored by late morning. In contrast, more than 50,000 customers were left in the dark in Tuesday’s storm.

She said Tuesday “was a doozy.” She said Wednesday “is nothing exciting.”

In the San Diego Unified School District, 100 workers returned to their warehouse jobs Wednesday morning at the district’s Instructional Media Center--minus the flashlights they had used for half the day Tuesday before being told to go home.

Tom Berger, a spokesman at Alvarado Hospital Medical Center, said operating rooms flooded in Tuesday’s storm were back in shape Wednesday.

Workers had begun Monday replacing parts of the flat roof over the second-floor surgery suites. Then the rains came.

“There was a lot of seepage down into the operating rooms,” he said. “It necessitated rescheduling all of the surgeries so we could go in, clean up and sanitize the area. But we’re back on schedule today.”

“It was an unfortunate thing,” he added. “It was time to change the roof and it doesn’t normally rain in September.”

But rain it did. Shigehara said 0.68 of an inch of rain fell on San Diego from 2 a.m. Tuesday through 1 a.m. Wednesday. That means 0.72 of an inch has fallen since this rainfall season began July 1, he said. Normally, San Diego would have recorded only 0.31 of an inch by this date.

“So we’re double our amount,” he said. “All on account of one storm.”