SigAlerts and Clogged Freeways : A Little Rain Spawns Lots of Accidents

It wasn’t that a lot of rain fell Tuesday, but there was enough to knot up morning rush-hour traffic with a series of overturned trucks, minor accidents and SigAlerts.

“The problem,” California Highway Patrol Officer Monty Keifer said, “was that there wasn’t enough rain to wash away the oil and grease that built up. People were going too fast for the conditions.”

The result was two or three times a normal day’s rate of accidents and a freeway system so snarled that thousands of drivers were angry and late for work.

The rain caused less havoc in Orange County than in Los Angeles, said CHP Officer Keith Thornhill in Santa Ana, although there was a SigAlert Tuesday morning in the Anaheim-Fullerton area when a cement truck overturned on the eastbound Riverside Freeway east of Magnolia Avenue.

With a light drizzle throughout the Los Angeles basin and several SigAlerts already in effect, the snarl tightened shortly after 6 a.m. when a tractor-trailer rig loaded with 22 tons of flour overturned on the two-lane southbound transition road between the Golden State and Santa Ana freeways.

The driver and his helper were treated at the scene for injuries. No one else was hurt, but one lane was closed for several hours while workers transferred 44,000 pounds of flour to another truck.

Bill Keene, KNX radio weather and traffic reporter for 14 years, called it “as bad a morning as I can remember.”

The control board at the state Department of Transportation operations center in downtown Los Angeles was aglitter with red lights marking traffic congestion.

The storm, which began Monday night, dropped .15 of an inch of rain in Santa Ana by 5 p.m. Tuesday, bringing the season’s total to .19 of an inch, according to Janice Roth, meteorologist for Weatherdata Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times. Normal rainfall to date for Santa Ana is .28 of an inch, she said.

High temperatures Tuesday were 70 degrees in Santa Ana and 66 degrees in Newport Beach. The overnight low in Santa Ana was 61.

The precipitation was the result of a rapidly deepening marine layer, Roth said, adding that a low-pressure system located several miles overhead had combined with a ground-level cold front to draw the moisture into the Southland.

The situation will not change much today, according to the National Weather Service, which predicted mostly cloudy skies and “a chance of showers.”

Throughout Tuesday morning, the SigAlerts continued:

- A truck jackknifed on a connector road between the Foothill Freeway and the San Gabriel River Freeway in the Irwindale area, temporarily closing it.

- The Golden State Freeway had several problems. A truck went off the southbound freeway at Penrose Street in the northern San Fernando Valley, making it stop-and-go in several directions. Later, two or three trucks were involved in accidents in Newhall Pass, forcing closure of the southbound lanes of the freeway at the Antelope Valley Freeway.

A power pole went down in Seal Beach Tuesday evening, cutting off electricity to hundreds of residents in that city for a short time. And another power failure prompted a traffic signal to go on the blink in Pacific Palisades, choking Pacific Coast Highway in the Malibu area.