Tornado Hits Homes in Huntington Beach : Weather: Roofs are ripped apart, trees downed and power interrupted. Storms are expected to continue.

A tornado touched down Tuesday night in Huntington Beach, ripping roofs apart, sending shingles crashing through windows, mangling trees and causing a widespread power outage.

The twister swept in from the ocean about 10:30 p.m., damaging 40 to 50 homes in areas around Beach Boulevard, Newland Street and Atlanta and Indianapolis avenues, and knocking over about 20 carports at Driftwood Mobile Homes. No injuries were reported.

“It’s a tornado,” Huntington Beach Police Lt. Jeff Cope said. “You can tell by the damage, good Lord. Any time you got a cemented, 8-by-8 beam thrown around and a roof torn off, it’s a tornado. . . . It looks like it’s done a pretty good job on the city,” he said.

Joyce Johnson, 47, a resident of Swansea Lane, where the tornado hit, said: “Glass went everywhere. We were watching TV and it started raining real fast. All of a sudden there was a noise and glass was breaking.”

Part of the roof from a house behind the Johnsons’ blew into their windows, and glass shattered over the bed that her daughter, Anisha Jackson, 19, would have been sleeping in if it hadn’t broken earlier.

“I feel blessed,” Johnson said. “Glass would have been all over her.”

Said Jackson, “I would have had a different face.”

“This has been a terrible night,” said another neighbor, whose roof was ripped off. But others, she said, “looked like they got it worse.”

Fallen trees blocked Magnolia Street and a power blackout affected an area of at least several blocks around Hamilton Avenue and Magnolia.

“There was just this big rumble and the house started shaking,” said Judy Steeman of Swansea Lane. She and her husband, Boomer, gathered across the street at their neighbor’s house where the wind blew a 25-foot Bayliner ski boat across the driveway, narrowly missing a parked car.

“Everybody knew it was a tornado because it was just a matter of about 15 or 20 seconds,” said Boomer Steeman.

Roy Pearce, manager of Driftwood Mobile Homes near Beach Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway, said about 20 carports and 10 roofs were blown down.

“You ought to see it back there,” Pearce said. “It’s a sight.” Pearce stood in a heavy rain that continued to lash the coastal area past midnight.

Fire Capt. Bruce Burton, who was supervising emergency activities immediately after the heavy winds struck, said, “It looks like it hit right over the golf pro shop here, and then moved toward Beach Boulevard and toward some condos.” Burton said information was sketchy but that no fires had resulted and none of the mobile homes overturned.

“There are no injuries here that we know of,” he said.

The site is about half a mile south of the posh new waterfront Hilton hotel, which was thrown into inky blackness by the power outage.

Traffic on Pacific Coast Highway, which was blackened by the outage, came to a standstill.

Forecasters are predicting that the rain will continue until Thursday. Today was expected to bring more rain, with up to an inch falling in some parts of the county.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if someone gets and inch and a half to 2 inches in the coastal mountain ranges,” said Marty McKewon of WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times. “There’s going to be another pretty potent storm that will last most of the day and bring at least a half an inch of rain all across Orange County.”

The storms also brought unseasonably cool temperatures. On Tuesday, Santa Ana and San Juan Capistrano registered lows of 44 degrees. Anaheim bottomed at 43 degrees.

But come Thursday, McKewon says, expect a dry and warming trend to clear up the weather in time for Easter and Passover weekends.

“After Wednesday it should be pretty decent,” he said. “This should be the last storm for a while.”

Temperatures on Thursday are expected to hover around 70 degrees countywide, rising into the mid-70s by Friday.

This latest storm is part of a storm pattern that has engulfed the West Coast since the beginning of March, bringing large amounts of snow from one end of the state to the other, with as much as 8 feet reported in some Sierra resorts since Saturday and quite a bit falling at lower altitudes in Southern California.

“What’s happening is the storms are dropping out of Alaska to the West Coast, strengthening, then moving inland over Southern California,” McKewon said. “Normally, they sweep right through the state but now they’re gathering tropical moisture and increasing in intensity.”

Not only was the snowfall much greater than usual for the end of March, but the storm remained violent. It spawned a tornado at Vandenberg Air Force Base, toppled one of the world’s tallest redwoods near Eureka, and sent an oak tree crashing through the windshield of a car in San Joaquin County, killing the driver by piercing him through the chest.

Snow survey officials of the state Department of Water Resources said that by the time the storm leaves the state sometime today, they expect the average snowpack in the Sierra and Cascades to rise to 75% of normal for this time of year. The water content of the snow was 53% of normal just last week.

Bill Mork, staff meteorologist for the department, said that in some areas of the Central Coast region and the Southern Sierra, March rainfall has reached three or four times the normal amount. Following months of dry conditions, Mork said it has pushed such communities as Santa Maria, Paso Robles, Fresno and Bakersfield above their annual normals.

Also above its annual normal was San Diego, where .91 of an inch of rain fell in the 24-hour period ending at 3 p.m. Tuesday, bringing total seasonal rainfall to 10.64 inches. Rainfall at the Los Angeles Civic Center, with just .25 of an inch in the period, stands at 11.11 inches, still more than 3 inches below the annual normal.

The town of Chico in the Sacramento Valley reported 11.12 inches of rain so far in March, a new record for the month in that community.

In several towns near Southland mountains, including Riverside, Fontana, Hemet, Temecula, Banning and Beaumont, some of the precipitation came in the form of snow. It briefly covered Interstate 10, the main route between Los Angeles and the desert resorts of the Coachella Valley, in the San Gorgonio Pass.

Snow flurries were reported Tuesday afternoon in Monrovia in the San Gabriel Valley.

During the afternoon, weather authorities reported that a particularly turbulent cell of thunderstorms, hail and heavy rain moved from the Lompoc area east through Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.

Meanwhile, an ecological tragedy occurred along the Avenue of Giants in Humboldt Redwood State Park near Eureka. Park Supt. Don Hoyle said the Dyerville tree fell during the storm when it was struck by another falling redwood.

The Guinness Book of World’s Records listed the Dyerville tree as the world’s tallest at 362 feet, but this is disputed, with at least two nearby trees said by park authorities to be taller.

Hoyle said park workers measured the fallen tree on the ground and it was more than 370 feet tall. It had been estimated at between 1,200 and 1,600 years old, and had a circumference of 52 feet.

Despite such spectacular events, meteorologists considered the storm most unusual for the heavy snow it brought to the Sierra. Since Saturday, they reported that between 5 and 8 feet had fallen from the Feather River in the north to the Stanislaus River in the south, and that almost as heavy falls had been reported south almost to Kernville.

Most Sierra ski resorts reported better than 100 inches on the ground, opening the prospect for good skiing through May.

Meanwhile, forecasts called for up to 3 feet of new snow by midday today in the Southern California mountains. A blizzard was predicted in the mountains of San Diego County and more than an inch of rain was predicted for low-lying Southland areas.

Times staff writers Shannon Sands, Kenneth Reich and John Kendall contributed to this story.