Record Rain Puts a Chill Into Holiday

So what if the barbecue coals were sodden and the sunblock trickled off like watered-down paint?

It rained .

A quirky Alaska-born storm, so wintry that it made the holiday calendar look foolish, scattered well over an inch of rain across the Los Angeles basin, stippling the mountains with snow and sending lifeguards home from the beach because holiday business was so quiet.

“It was the slowest Memorial Day I can remember in years,” said Lt. Warren Rigby, who has put in 37 years at county beaches. “Normally it’s like a big holiday in the summertime. . . . I’ve never seen it this way.”

County lifeguards who had braced for the standard Memorial Day mob of 350,000 at Santa Monica-area beaches counted at most 3,500, many of those shivering against lifeguard towers or huddled beneath rock jetties to escape the knife-edged wind.

Business was dismally worse at Newport Beach. On the same sand where 90,000 had sprawled on Sunday, not a soul disported on Monday in temperatures as low as 48 degrees. “Even the die-hards are gone,” mourned lifeguard Jim Turner.

In all, 1.17 inches of rain fell at the Civic Center--a breakaway record, since the best any previous Memorial Day could muster was .12 inches, in 1972. San Gabriel recorded 1.52 inches, and San Juan Capistrano measured 1.56. Meteorologist Steve Burback of WeatherData Inc., a Wichita, Kan., firm which provides forecasts for The Times, said, “It’s acting more like wintertime.”

The rain that swept down the Alaska-Canadian weather pipeline inundated Northern California and muddied the Southland, swept rain across the deserts on its way out of California, scrambling homebound holiday traffic Monday even worse than usual.

A brief midmorning snow at Big Bear in the San Bernardino Mountains on Monday didn’t do anything but surprise people. “It didn’t even stick,” said Sheriff’s Sgt. E. Bechtel. “It just kind of fell and disappeared.”

Snow alerts were issued briefly, then canceled, for Mt. Shasta and the western Sierra Nevada and Siskiyous, where rain was expected to linger.

None of this put much of a dent in the local rainfall shortfall. While the 1.17 inches brought the monthly total to a grand 1.20 inches, this year’s rainfall so far amounts to 7.38 inches, not quite half of the normal 14.82 inches.

The late spurt of rain--more like a squirt, measured against what rainfall totals ought to be--also puts little distance between California and the drought.

It gave San Francisco a May record of 1.47 inches, flooded 20 cars in an underground garage of a Walnut Creek apartment complex after a drainage canal overflowed, and settled six inches of rain onto the town of Honeydew, south of Eureka.

But it left both ends of the state at least half a foot shy of normal rainfall. Sacramento may be the only place in much of the state with above-normal season rainfall, and that was after the holiday storm broke an 84-year-old record there, weather officials said.

In Los Angeles Monday morning, water pooled up to two feet deep in traffic lanes and on exit ramps along the Santa Monica Freeway between the Harbor Freeway and the East Los Angeles interchange. It closed about four miles of that main route for nearly six hours, said CHP Officer Sherry Noel.

“It has been crazy in here,” said Noel on Monday evening, “and it still is.”

Storm drains stuffed with debris since the last rain backed up water onto the roadways. Mud from construction along the Harbor Freeway at 51st Street slid into two northbound lanes, some downtown Harbor Freeway ramps were closed and Pacific Coast Highway and other roads in Malibu reported mudslides. “There’s so much here,” said Noel, checking her list, “I’m just looking for the important stuff.”

Throughout the Southland, the rain snuffed out holiday plans. The 26th annual Memorial Day ceremony at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Cypress was canceled because of the drizzle. At St. Catherine Laboure Catholic Church picnic in Clairemont in San Diego County, the first cancellation in 19 years sent about 100 parishioners into the parish hall, “where we ended up having the picnic,” said Msgr. Bill Cuddihy. The rain also closed down the Elizabethan carryings-on at the outdoor Renaissance Pleasure Faire near Devore in San Bernardino County. In parched Santa Barbara--living under the state’s strictest water restriction rules--the rain was enough to turn heads.

“I tell you, it was really kind of a funny phenomenon,” said Police Sgt. Richard Green. The crowds who have taken to strolling along Santa Barbara’s main streets in the evening kept it up in Sunday night’s late downpour, when the streets were flowing with runoff. “It’s like it’s been such a long time since there’s been any rain, they didn’t even know they were supposed to come in out of it,” said Green. “I had to educate my 3-year-old kid on what rain is--he was born before we had rain.”

Wind warnings remained up into the night as winds gusting to 30 and 35 m.p.h. raked waters from Point Conception to the Mexican border, Rigby said. County rescuers had pulled a half-dozen beleaguered boats from the water by late Monday.

The Coast Guard planned to search through the night for two men lost off the Ventura County coast: a windsurfer who went down about three miles offshore, and a 49-year-old man who fell out of his sailboat trying to recover a dinghy about two miles offshore. Searchers found the windsurfer’s sail and flotation vest. The surfer, experienced in Hawaiian waters, was wearing a wet suit. The other missing man, according to the Coast Guard, was a “good sailor” whose companion told officials that she did not know how to sail.

Today promises gradual clearing of cloudy skies to a sunny afternoon across the basin, Burback said. Temperatures should be in the upper 60s near the coast, and the low to mid 70s in the inland and coastal valleys.

The Rain 24-hour total: 1.17 in. Storm total: 1.17 in. Montly total: 1.20 in. Total for season: 7.38 in. Last season to date: 8.08 in. Normal season to date: 14.82 in. Figures, based on 4 p.m. reading at the Los Angeles Civic Center, are complied by the National Weather Service, which provides no later data.