2 Deaths, Slides, Floods and Blackouts Blamed on Heavy Rainstorm

The heavy rainfall that drenched Southern California Thursday left two people dead, caused landslides and floods that washed away a building and buried cars and triggered widespread power outages.

The National Weather Service said Los Angeles received 1.6 inches of rain during the storm, a record for the day unbroken for 46 years.

Rain-slick roads were blamed in the deaths of two people killed in separate traffic accidents and caused hundreds of minor accidents, officials said.

A CHP officer narrowly escaped being buried under rock and mud on the Golden State Freeway in the San Fernando Valley.

CHP Officer Vickie Warren had stopped on the freeway to help disabled motorists below the Lankershim Boulevard overpass shortly before 9 p.m. Thursday when the embankment above gave way and buried her patrol car.

The landslide “surrounded the car so quickly that she had to climb out the window and wade through waist-high water and mud to get away,” CHP Officer Steve Munday said, adding that Warren suffered a cut on her hand.

All northbound lanes of the road were blocked off by the slide, which caused an estimated $1 million in damage, Munday said, adding that the freeway was to have been reopened Friday night.

“It’s a big, incredible mess out here,” he said. Crews with the state Department of Transportation are “bulldozing the dirt and we’re trying to pump out water.”

A tractor-trailer rig was stopped in its tracks by the mud slide and at least two cars were stuck and then flooded up to their windows, CHP Officer Mike Maas said. The occupants of all the vehicles escaped without injury.

The overpass, believed to have been weakened by the slide, was closed pending an inspection by Caltrans.

Late Thursday night, Miles Rogholt, 56, was killed when he lost control of his car and slid into the path of a truck-tractor on the San Gabriel River Freeway in Lakewood, CHP Officer Lujuanna Lopez said.

Earlier in the day, Ann Lee Stella, 60, of Chino, was killed in the Brea area when her car crossed the center divider of Carbon Canyon Road and crashed into a truck, Brea Police Lt. Don Rogers said.

In another incident, Francisco Maciel, 35, of Oxnard, was seriously hurt when a rock loosened by the rains crashed through his windshield while driving along Pacific Coast Highway near Point Mugu, officials said.

A seven-mile stretch of Angeles Crest Highway was closed Friday due to slides between Briar Tree Drive in La Canada Flintridge and the Clear Creek Ranger Station in the Angeles National Forest, sheriff’s Deputy Brian Tibbett said.

The storm also triggered power outages throughout the region.

Southern California Edison officials reported that as many as 100,000 of their customers from Santa Barbara to southern Orange County were left without electricity for brief periods Thursday. And at least 7,000 homes and businesses in the San Fernando Valley and downtown Los Angeles were without power when lightning strikes hit power poles and lines, Department of Water and Power spokesman Ed Freudenburg said. About 250 DWP customers remained in the dark Friday.

In San Diego, where slightly more than half an inch of rain had fallen, authorities said a mud slide on the Rincon Indian reservation--an area denuded by a brush fire earlier this month--destroyed a corrugated metal bungalow that is headquarters to the Yuima Municipal Water District.

Additionally, a 12-car pileup on Interstate 15 within San Diego city limits was blamed on the rain and spilled diesel fuel from an earlier collision. No serious injuries were reported.