Dense Fog Skips In and Out of John Wayne Airport, Disrupting Southland Flights

Dense fog blanketed parts of Orange County on Saturday, obscuring visibility so much at John Wayne Airport that flights were ordered diverted to other airports by late in the afternoon.

The airport shutdown occurred at 4 p.m. as a thick layer of fog that had shrouded the county’s beachfront communities for most of the day pushed inland as far as Santa Ana. Police reported a spate of minor traffic accidents related to the fog. Also, two rescue helicopters at UCI Medical Center in Orange were unable to respond to an emergency call Saturday night in the Santa Ana Mountains because they were grounded by fog.

The 8 p.m. emergency call involved a bicyclist who was reported missing atop 5,600-foot Santiago Peak--the highest point in Orange County. However, the call was later called off after the bicyclist turned up unharmed.

The disruption at John Wayne Airport created minimal problems because the Saturday evening air traffic was light, airport officials said. Both inbound and outbound flights were rerouted to Ontario International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport.

LAX was reported on the verge of closing several times because of fog late Saturday. Intermittent airport closures were also ordered at San Diego’s Lindbergh Field and at Long Beach Municipal Airport, Federal Aviation Administration officials said.

FAA duty officer Dick Hallen said late Saturday that a closure at LAX could force air-traffic controllers to divert flights as far away as Las Vegas. Hallen said the closures were difficult to predict because the fog has been rolling in and out of the Southland airports. John Wayne Airport, for instance, was ordered opened and closed several times during the evening as the fog fluctuated in density.

“Sometimes you can see the tower and sometimes you can’t,” said Bonnie Vlach, an airport station supervisor for American Airlines, which had a dozen inbound and outbound flights scheduled for John Wayne late Saturday.

Throughout the day, fog enveloped the Orange County coastline from San Clemente to Seal Beach.

“I went out a little while ago and I couldn’t see 3 feet in front of my face,” a San Clemente police dispatcher, who did not give her name, said early Saturday evening.

The fog--caused by a sudden return of moist ocean breezes after 3 days of dry high pressure over Southern California--was expected to dissipate by Monday, National Weather Service forecasters said late Saturday.

Overnight Saturday, low clouds and fog were expected to extend inland as far as the San Bernardino Valley and then burn off today, leaving partly cloudy skies over the entire region, said National Weather Service specialist Betty Reo in Los Angeles.