Rain and Snow Pay a Rare Visit : Weather: The Southland is still 3 inches below normal rainfall for the season.

That dull thrumming sound you heard on the roof around midnight Monday was not a belated fusillade of celebratory New Year’s gunfire, but something that occurs almost as infrequently: rain.

It was the area’s first storm since Thanksgiving, bringing nearly half an inch of rain to central Los Angeles and as much as eight inches of snow to Southland mountains by Tuesday afternoon.

Nonetheless, it really wasn’t enough to more than moisten the dust on the palm fronds. The storm, which moved into Arizona, left the region’s begging bowl still three inches below normal rainfall for the season--normal being about 4 1/2 inches, the National Weather Service said.

Farther out, however, the year’s inaugural storm iced the high roads of the Ridge Route through Gorman and blew up blizzard conditions at Big Bear Lake, closing down schools but opening up new prospects for the ski season.

The weather was held accountable for the death of a Riverside woman who was thrown from her car when it overturned on a wet road near Moreno Valley on Tuesday as she was taking her son to school.

Five thousand students in the Big Bear Lake area received an extra day’s holiday when the Rim of the World Unified School District closed its seven schools.

Transportation supervisors decided at 4:30 a.m. Monday that snowdrifts made the tricky mountain roads too risky for bus drivers who ferry 65% of the district’s students to school.

The highway “is treacherous, so we always fall on the side of safety in these things,” district spokeswoman Colleen Patrick said.

So completely did the snow blot out the roads that one disoriented man parked his car in the middle of Big Bear Boulevard, blocking both lanes of traffic, and fell asleep.

San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies, alerted by passers-by, roused the man at 3 a.m. and sent him on his way.

“Apparently he spun out, thought he was in a parking lot and just stopped right there, just outside of town,” Sgt. Steve Moran said. “That tells you how bad it was up here.”

For the second time in five days, snow chains were necessary on the topmost roads going into the Big Bear area, above 6,500 feet, California Highway Patrol Officer D. A. Walker said.

CHP spokesman John Anderson said a 29-year-old Riverside woman was killed on Reche Canyon Road near Moreno Valley when her car skidded off the rain-slicked pavement and overturned as she drove with her 7-year-old son.

The woman was not wearing a seat belt, Anderson said. Her son, who suffered scrapes and bruises, was, he said.

Elsewhere, the inclement conditions provided the usual litany of inconveniences for fair-weather Angelenos:

A lightning strike took out the radio antenna at the South Gate police station around 1 a.m. Tuesday, reducing it to emergency backup power for a time.

Some minor flooding plagued Burbank streets.

Traffic was impeded, but not halted, on the Ridge Route in Gorman, where snowplows and sand trucks plied their trade on snowy, icy lanes of Interstate 5. The CHP noted 12 accidents there, none of them serious.

Electricity was lost to about 4,000 Los Angeles Basin homes for a time in the early morning. And a power outage was reported in South Los Angeles late Tuesday night. The outage, which affected about 3,000 customers, apparently was related to winds that picked up as the front moved eastward, the Department of Water and Power said.

Similar problems were reported in Glendale and other foothill communities.

Southland ski resort operators expected dwindling crowds to be lured back by the new drifts.

“A storm does a lot psychologically to motivate people to come up here,” said Cathy Boire, a spokeswoman for Snow Summit in the San Bernardino Mountains near Big Bear.

The .45 of an inch of rain at the Los Angeles Civic Center put the season total at 1.52, abysmally below normal.

Other Southland areas fared better, with .71 of an inch reported in San Juan Capistrano and atop Mt. Wilson. Long Beach had .58, Montebello .56 and Torrance, .48.

Tuesday’s high was 63 degrees downtown. According to WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times, today promises gusty, northeast winds in the mountains and foothills and sunny skies with highs in the low to mid-60s.