I-5 Closed in Grapevine Area : Rain Soaks Area; 2 Dead in Crashes

After a week of record cold and spotty showers, a daylong downpour Thursday dumped nearly an inch of rain on parts of Orange County, triggering accidents and snarling freeways as a Pacific storm swept inland.

Highways and streets from Fullerton to Mission Viejo were littered with accidents, and at least two people were killed, including one in a head-on collision on a winding section of Coast Highway north of Laguna Beach and another when an Orange County Transit District bus collided with a car in a Santa Ana intersection.

Scattered power outages were also reported as the storm, which had been expected Wednesday, moved ashore Thursday morning.

Elsewhere, Caltrans officials said that, although some emergency vehicles were able to get through late Thursday, Interstate 5, the main north-south artery in the state, probably would remain closed until sometime this morning.

Some of the residents and motorists stranded by the snow since Tuesday in Frazier Park, Gorman, Holiday Valley and Lebec were beginning to run out of food and propane late Thursday night.

In Orange County, daytime temperatures in most places barely cracked 50 degrees, and by late afternoon there were snow flurries in some foothill areas and along Ortega Highway in the south county.

The storm’s surge surprised county officials, who decided at midmorning Thursday--before the heaviest rain started falling--not to open National Guard armories in Santa Ana and Fullerton to shelter the homeless.

The armories were not opened, a county official said, because the forecast early Thursday called for only a 30% chance of rain later in the day and overnight temperatures in the mid-40s.

Bob Griffith, chief deputy director of the county’s Social Services Agency, said the decision to use the armories as shelters must be made by 10 a.m. on any given day. The decision, he said, is based on weather forecasts: armories are opened if overnight temperatures below 40 degrees are predicted or temperatures are expected to drop below 50 with at least a 50% chance of rain.

Thursday morning, with a steady but light rain falling and a favorable forecast for later in the day, the armory option was vetoed.

“I feel guilty,” Griffith said, as the rain continued, “but it takes time to open and staff those facilities. We have to arrange for security, cots and blankets, food and staff.”

Each armory can accommodate 125 people overnight, and the two facilities have been used as shelters several times this winter.

“It’s a tough call,” Griffith said. “We’ve opened them sometimes when it turned out that we didn’t need to. And then there are days like this. It’s frustrating.”

County officials were able to scramble and open one shelter late Thursday for about 75 homeless people at the Santa Ana YMCA.

A break in the weeklong siege of cold and wet conditions is expected today.

Skies should be partly cloudy with only a slight chance of rain this morning, predicted meteorologist Dave Beusterien of WeatherData, which provides forecasts for The Times. Highs in the upper 50s are expected today, with lows in the 40s and upper 30s.

Some clearing and a few degrees of warming is expected Saturday, but the outlook for Sunday is unsettled, Beusterien said.

“Looks like you can put the umbrellas away for a couple of days,” he said. “But by Sunday, it looks like there’s an outside shot at more rain.”

That’s good news for drought watchers like James Van Haun of the Orange County Water District.

After two winters of below-average precipitation, Thursday’s rain was a welcome sight for district officials who maintain the county’s major aquifer, the natural storage vault for water under north and central Orange County.

Rain Below Normal

Rainfall this winter is running 1 to 2 inches below normal.

But by Thursday night, the storm had dropped more than a half-inch of rain on most coastal areas and more than an inch in the foothills and canyons.

“This is great,” Van Haun said. “We’re just hoping for one storm after another. The next 3 to 4 weeks is critical. . . . “

Critical was the diagnosis for traffic on some county roadways Thursday, particularly the southbound Interstate 5. Shortly after 9 a.m. south of Oso Parkway, 10 vehicles, including a tractor-trailer, were involved in two chain-reaction collisions that tied up traffic for several hours. There were only two minor injuries, authorities said, but the big rig wound up sideways across three of four freeway lanes, backing up traffic for nearly 3 miles.

The trucker, who was not cited, apparently lost control of his rig on the slick pavement and hit another car, triggering the accident, California Highway Patrol spokesman Ken Daily said.

“It was one of those days when you look and see the rain and know you’re not going to have time for lunch,” Daily said. “It was nonstop.”

Authorities are blaming the weather for a four-car pileup on Coast Highway near Laguna Beach that left one man dead, another injured and a gnarl of traffic in its wake.

California Highway Patrol dispatcher Jenneke Keith said the name of the dead man could not be released until his next of kin had been notified. The driver of one of the other cars, Walid Albinali, 22, of Irvine, was taken to Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo where he was being treated in the intensive care unit.

Reportedly Lost Control

According to an officer’s report, Keith said, Albinali lost control of his car as he was heading north on Coast Highway about 2 miles south of Cameo Shores.

It was just after 1 p.m., according to the report, and raining.

“Due to weather and speed, he lost control of (his) vehicle, spun out of control into oncoming traffic in the southbound lane, where he sideswiped” one car, and then another, the report said.

A fourth car was unable to avoid the collision and ran into the second car that had been sideswiped. The driver of that car, which was hit twice, was pronounced dead on arrival at Hoag Hospital, Keith said.

Keith said the drivers of the other two cars were able to walk away from the accident. They had been wearing seat belts, according to the report, while Albinali and the other driver had not.

About 10:10 p.m., an Orange County Transit District bus struck a car at the intersection of Harbor Boulevard and Sunflower Avenue in Santa Ana. The driver of the car, believed to be a 39-year-old Fountain Valley woman, was killed in the collision, but the bus driver, a 14-year veteran driver for OCTD was shaken but unhurt. There were no passengers aboard the bus, which was out of service, according to officials at the scene.

According to an eyewitness, the car, a 1982 Chrysler coupe, was westbound on Sunflower Avenue when it went through a red light. Ty Hansche, 23, of Santa Ana, said he was driving behind the northbound bus when he saw it collide with the woman’s car.

“In a split second, the car was under the bus, then the bus and car crossed over the center divider with metal scraping on the cement,” Hansche said. The bus, dragging the wreckage of the car and a signal light pole with it, crossed into the southbound lanes of Harbor Boulevard and plowed into an OCTD bus shelter on the curb.

The bus driver was identified as Gloria Novotny, 45, of Anaheim, OCTD spokeswoman Joanne Curran said.

Santa Ana police and firefighters who responded said the woman was declared dead at the scene. An investigation is continuing, police said.

Earlier Thursday, a driver hit a car stopped in the car-pool lane of the northbound San Diego Freeway while its owner was changing a tire, CHP officer Leslie Ann Hill said. That accident created a four-car collision and a 2-hour traffic tie-up.

Keith said James Dell George, 39, of Harbor City was in stable condition at St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach with a broken shoulder and collarbone and punctured lungs.

North of Los Angeles, Caltrans spokesman Thomas Knox said that 17 snow-plow trucks, three graders and a rotary snow plow were working “pretty much around the clock” to clear the 50-mile stretch of Interstate 5 closed between Lake Hughes Road on the south and Laval Road on the north.

Northbound drivers were advised to use the coastal route, U.S. 101, as an alternative.

Times staff writers Kim Jackson and Eric Lichtblau contributed to this story.