Winds Wreak Death, Damage and Blackouts

Santa Ana winds gusting up to 90 m.p.h. ripped paths of destruction through Southern California early Wednesday--blasting out windows, felling trees, toppling trucks and planes, battering homes.

Authorities blamed the winds for the death of a man who stepped on a downed power line in Azusa and were investigating whether the gusty conditions contributed to the deaths of three others, who were crushed in a chain-reaction accident involving a tractor-trailer rig on the Foothill Freeway.

Almost 500,000 customers lost electrical power for up to 12 hours, and at least one television station was knocked off the air.

Expected to Abate

The winds are expected to abate today. There is even a slight chance of some showers tonight to briefly relieve the extremely dry conditions associated with the winds. Relative humidity dipped to an arid 4% Wednesday after reaching only as high as 16%.

But forecasters said the Santa Anas should be back again in full force on Friday.

The gusts were so strong in the Azusa-Glendora area Wednesday morning that the California Highway Patrol closed 8 miles of the Foothill Freeway at 4:30 a.m. after at least three big trucks were blown over.

Fifteen light planes were overturned by the winds at Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport, and five more were damaged at Orange County’s John Wayne Airport. A CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter was blown over at the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro and two light aircraft were torn from their moorings at Van Nuys Airport.

Several small boats tore loose from their moorings in Newport Harbor, and one of them--a 34-foot power boat--took on water and sank.

Amtrak said downed trees in the San Diego area blocked the rails and disrupted signals on the Los Angeles-San Diego line, delaying traffic on the route for up to 1 1/2 hours.

Several small brush and grass fires--some of them started by fallen power lines--were fanned by the winds in the Duarte and Altadena areas and in northern San Diego County, but all were quickly extinguished by firefighters.

A wind-whipped blaze damaged the roofs of seven homes in the Villa Park area of Orange County, burning for an hour before it was brought under control.

Another small fire was started by a downed power line on the front lawn of a home on Orangecrest Avenue in the Azusa area at about 2:15 a.m. Friends said a neighbor, Julio Mendoza, 39, ran over to help extinguish the blaze.

Wire Whipped by Wind

“I could see the wire, jumping about in the wind, and then I saw Mr. Mendoza, lying there on the ground, on top of it,” said a resident of the home, who asked that his name not be used.

“I guess he was trying to put out the fire with a hose” when he came in contact with the power line, the man said. “He was just trying to help.”

Mendoza was pronounced dead at the scene.

In the Foothill Freeway accident (Photo in Part II, Page 1), three Sylmar men were killed after they got out of two vehicles to retrieve empty sandbags that had fallen from a pickup truck. Officials identified the victims, who were part of an early-morning convoy of workers traveling to a Canyon Country construction site, as Juan Martinez, 47, Rudy Calsada, 46, and Anacleto Hidalgo Hernandez, 26.

Authorities said Martinez, who was driving the pickup, pulled to the shoulder of the transition road linking the westbound Foothill and the northbound Golden State freeways along with Hernandez, who was driving a Buick.

The three men were standing between the vehicles when a tractor-trailer rig driven by David A. Condon, 20, of Rancho Cucamonga, came around the bend and veered onto the shoulder. Officials said the rig hit the back of the Buick, which was pushed into the rear of the pickup, crushing the victims.

“We are looking into the possibility of it being wind-related,” CHP Officer Ralph Elvira said. “That is based on the (tractor-trailer) driver’s statement that a gust of wind forced him to veer onto the shoulder.”

Condon and two other construction crew members, whose names were not released, suffered minor injuries.

The high winds were also responsible for ripping apart the roofs of houses, including the isolated hilltop residence of Luanne Munns, near Sierra Madre Avenue in an unincorporated area between Azusa and Glendora.

When Munns, a publicist at the Los Angeles County Arboretum, and her daughter, Melanie, awoke to hear the winds tearing at their roof, they tried “to batten down a couple of little transoms that had blown open when there was a roaring sound,” Munns recalled later.

But it was to no avail.

“We could hear the window glass shattering and then there was a thunderous ‘whoom!’ as the wind tore the roof off the living room,” she said.

“After the big thump, we weren’t even tempted to come out of the bedroom.You could hear the glass continuing to shatter. . . . “When it got light, we finally went out and looked. Over the living room, there’s just nothing there. The whole northeast corner of the house is gone.”

At the Royal Oaks mobile home park in the nearby Charter Oak area, Judith Bicklehaupt awoke during the night to feel her home shuddering in the wind.

“I grabbed my Bible and went outside to pray . . . to ask the Lord to protect us,” she said later. “As I came back up the steps, this great big tree went down. It sounded like breaking twigs, only a hundred times stronger.”

The tree missed Bicklehaupt’s home, but it landed squarely atop the residence next door, damaging it and the brand new van parked next to it. The occupants of the home were in bed at the time, but all escaped injury.

The owner of the damaged mobile home and van--David Street--was away from the home Wednesday morning trying to find someone to remove the tree.

In Arcadia, the winds blew down a 60-foot-long plaster wall at the west end of the Santa Anita Racetrack grandstand several hours before racing fans arrived. The strong gusts also tore off roofing from the grandstand and some barns. Damage was estimated at about $100,000, track officials said, but there were no reports of injury, and the day’s racing proceeded as usual.

In Laguna Beach, a big oak tree fell on two homes, but once again none of the occupants was injured. Other trees fell on cars in Costa Mesa.

Strong gusts lifted an unoccupied 50-foot construction trailer out of a shopping center parking lot in Orange County’s Trabuco Canyon and tossed it down a 20-foot embankment and onto a roadway below. Officials said the trailer was damaged beyond repair.

About 420,000 Southern California Edison Co. customers suffered power outages ranging from a fraction of a second to more than 12 hours during the windstorms. Service was restored to 396,000 of them by mid-afternoon Wednesday, with full restoration of service expected by this morning, SCE officials said.

Most of the SCE outages were in the foothill communities ranging east from Pasadena to San Bernardino, in Torrance and Inglewood, in Orange County and in the back country of San Bernardino County.

Additional blackouts cut service to about 117,000 Orange and San Diego county customers of the San Diego Gas & Electric Co. and the Anaheim Utilities Department.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said that about 50,000 of its customers lost power due to the winds. Most of the blackouts were in the eastern San Fernando Valley, with scattered outages in West Los Angeles, Venice and Hollywood. Service was restored to all but 3,000 customers by mid-afternoon, with full service expected by midnight, DWP officials said.

TV Station Darkened

One of the SCE blackouts cut power to the KCET television transmitter atop Mt. Wilson, knocking the UHF station, which broadcasts over Channel 28, off the air for about 90 minutes. SCE spokesmen said other broadcasters atop the mountain had emergency power sources that kept them on the air during the power outage.

The strongest winds reported Wednesday were the 90 m.p.h.-plus gusts recorded at the Orange County Sheriff’s Harbor Patrol station in Newport Beach at about 4 a.m.

The National Weather Service recorded gusts of up to 63 m.p.h. at Ontario International Airport, and velocities of 50 m.p.h. were reported at a number of locations throughout the Southland.

Dan Bowman, a meteorologist for WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times, said gusts as high as 70 m.p.h. may well have blown through some canyon areas where velocities are not recorded.

Bowman said the winds were the product of two weather systems--a high-pressure mass over southern Idaho and northern Nevada and a low-pressure system over New Mexico. Winds circulate clockwise around high pressure and counterclockwise around low pressure, so the two have been combining to pump air rapidly into Southern California.

Emerges Warm and Dry

This air is compressed as it descends over the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains and flows out into the coastal valleys, warm and dry.

Temperatures at the Los Angeles Civic Center peaked at a relatively warm 74 degrees Wednesday, compared to the normal high for the date of 69.

Bowman said the winds will abate today--topping out at 10 to 20 m.p.h.--as a low-pressure system passes rapidly through Southern California, bringing with it some overcast and a slight chance of showers by this evening.

But he said the Santa Ana winds should return again Friday as another high-pressure system establishes itself inland.

“The winds could be just as strong,” Bowman said. “It’s still a little early to tell.”

Times staff writers Nieson Himmel, Paul Feldman and Michael Connelly in Los Angeles, Andrea Estapa in San Diego County, Louis Sahagun in San Bernardino County and Doug Brown, Jim Carlton, Lonn Johnston, Lanie Jones, Carlos Lozano, Hugo Martin and Carla Rivera in Orange County contributed to this article.