Season’s 1st Big Storm Brings Rain, Snow : Weather: Weekend fronts may be followed by another on Wednesday. Showers left up to two inches of precipitation.

The first major storm of the season dropped up to two inches of badly needed rain Friday and Saturday, blanketing the Ventura County back country with snow, filling dry creeks and causing a flurry of rockslides, accidents and power outages.

More rain was expected to begin pelting the county early today, continuing steadily until morning and turning into scattered showers and possibly thundershowers throughout the day, the National Weather Service said.

Today’s storm was expected to drop another one to two inches on the southern half of the county and leave another foot of snow in Los Padres National Forest in the north. But the back-to-back storms will not drop enough to cause any major flooding problems, said Terry Schaeffer, National Weather Service meteorologist in Santa Paula.

“We’ve got a long ways to go before any barrancas flow over,” Schaeffer said. “We would need a series of storms, and we just haven’t had that.”

Schaeffer said there is a strong chance that a third storm could move over the county Wednesday, carrying more significant rainfall.

The storm that began Friday evening caused a series of rock and mud slides on Pacific Coast Highway, officials said. Officers also answered dozens of calls to minor accidents around the county Saturday, officials said.

“The officers were scrambling from one accident to the next for a while,” said California Highway Patrol Sgt. Matthew DeMarco. “You take the first major rain of the year, add wet roads and ‘X’ number of cars, and you’re going to have accidents.”

In one accident at the Moorpark Freeway on-ramp at Janss Road, a car driven by Nancy Baird of Thousand Oaks spun out when she hit standing water, slamming into three other cars on the freeway and injuring a woman.

No major injuries were reported in any of the accidents.

Snow from the storm forced the closure of California 33 above Wheeler Gorge in Los Padres National Forest, DeMarco said.

But the closed sign did not discourage Dave Shulman of Simi Valley and his friends from driving the easily passable road in to a Rose Valley campground. However, the moods of some of the potential campers changed once they found snow on the ground and accommodations in the borrowed camper less than ideal.

“I’ve got a camper that’s leaking all over the place and two people with wet feet,” Shulman said, referring to friend Sharon Parker and her 7-year-old daughter, Jessica, who huddled inside the camper. “But we haven’t made a decision yet about whether we are staying.”

Lanny Kaufer, manager of Wheeler Hot Springs, a spa and restaurant north of Ojai, said the cold weather hadn’t hurt his business.

“With this kind of weather, we always get lots of calls for hot tubs,” he said.

The rain also left nearly 7,500 customers without power at various times Friday night and Saturday, a spokesman for Southern California Edison said. A transformer failure left 2,500 people in the dark for 50 minutes in the Newbury Park area Friday night and a utility pole fire in Ojai knocked out electricity for 3,000 customers for about 15 minutes. Another 1,900 customers around the county experienced other brief outages, spokesman Steve Hansen said.

The rain also caused minor flooding in a parking lot at Mountain Gate Plaza in Simi Valley on Saturday morning.

“It was more than half a foot high,” said Jamal Tico, who owns Tico’s Mexican Food in the shopping center at 1st and Easy streets. “You could park your car, but it wasn’t easy.”

A drain pipe in the parking lot was too small, causing the water to rise, Tico said.

Storm totals as of 8 a.m. Saturday included 1.18 inches at the Ventura County Government Center in Ventura, 2.01 inches in Oxnard, 1.61 inches in Thousand Oaks, 1.22 inches in Simi Valley, 1.10 inches in Santa Paula, 1.54 inches in Fillmore and 0.98 inch in Moorpark.

A total of 1.91 inches has fallen in Ventura since July 1, according to WeatherData, which provides forecasts for The Times. That compares to 4.28 inches for the period in a normal year. Point Mugu has received 2.22 inches so far this year, compared with a normal total of 3.9 inches.

Clouds from today’s storm are expected to keep nighttime temperatures in the high 30s. But Monday night, the clearing skies should send temperatures plunging to the upper 20s to low 30s, Schaeffer said. Farmers will have to use heaters and wind machines to protect orchards, but the weather should cause no serious damage, said Schaeffer, who specializes in agricultural meteorology.

Farmers welcomed the storms, which allowed them to turn off expensive irrigation systems, said Don Reeder, past president of the Ventura County Farm Bureau.

“Up to now, we have irrigated 11 out of the last 12 months,” said Reeder, who also operates Pro Ag Inc., a company that manages 2,000 acres of farmland for 100 owners. “All the budgets are figured on irrigating seven to eight months of the year, so all the budgets are shot.”

Times correspondents Peggy Y. Lee and Maia Davis contributed to this story.

* SNOWY SOUTHLAND: A1