Light Rain Multiplies Woes for Commuters

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

“The problem,” said California Highway Patrolman Monty Keifer, “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.

Despite earlier predictions of nothing more serious than additional drizzles through the night and into today, the San Gabriel Mountains and parts of the San Gabriel Valley were getting heavy showers during the evening. There were reports of a half inch of rain falling there between 6:15 and 7 p.m.

The National Weather Service then took another look at the charts and concluded that “widely scattered showers, some heavy, will continue over the Southern California coastal, valley and mountain areas” through today. There could be up to an inch of rain in the coastal areas and up to 2 inches in some mountain sectors, the weather service said.

But meteorologist Janice Roth of WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times, said she did not believe it would be more than a half inch along the coast and perhaps an inch in the mountains.

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

No one was seriously hurt, but one lane was closed for several hours while 44,000 pounds of flour was moved 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 Caltrans operations center in downtown Los Angeles was aglitter with red lights marking traffic congestion.

The last time the Los Angeles streets were wet was Aug. 24, when .05 of an inch fell at the Civic Center.

Tuesday’s drizzle totaled only .01 of an inch at the Civic Center by 5 p.m., the latest the National Weather Service figures said. Los Angeles International Airport recorded .07.

Some other rainfall totals reported at that hour were Monrovia with .12, Mt. Wilson with .51, Newport Beach with .07, San Gabriel with .12, Santa Ana with .15, Santa Monica with .03 and Woodland Hills with .08.

The Civic Center temperature reached a high of 67 degrees, which was the lowest maximum reading for a Sept. 20 since 1945, when it reached 69. The overnight low was 61. Relative humidity ranged from 93% to 59%.

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

Throughout the day Tuesday, 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 crashed in Newhall Pass, forcing closure of the southbound lanes of the freeway at the Antelope Valley Freeway. Tuesday evening a truck jackknifed south of Western Avenue in Glendale, closing three lanes.

Trash Truck Overturns

- A trash truck overturned on the eastbound Ventura Freeway at Mulholland Drive in the west San Fernando Valley, closing two outside lanes for two hours.

A power failure prompted a traffic signal to go on the blink in Pacific Palisades, choking Pacific Coast Highway in the Malibu area. Traffic was backed up for several miles. Outages in Sun Valley and elsewhere affected a total of about 10,000 customers for short periods, said Los Angeles Department of Water and Power spokesman Ed Freudenburg.

“Very light rain on power poles shorted the insulators,” Freudenburg said. “The first rain of the year mixes with dust which settles on the insulators. A little rain . . . can cause a lot of power problems.”