Hail Pounds Ojai Area, Delays Golf Tourney

An Alaskan storm forced a delay in an Ojai golf tournament, pummeled rooftops in Upper Ojai with acorn-sized hail and dropped snow on the ridge tops Saturday.

The GTE West Senior PGA Classic was halted for nearly two hours because of lightning, said Jeff Johnson, who works at the pro shop at the Ojai Valley Inn and Country Club.

Play was stopped at 1:30 p.m. and resumed about 3:15 p.m., he said.

The hailstorm, confined to a small valley in Upper Ojai off California 150, pounded the area for nearly an hour.

“This is one of the most freaky storms you’ll ever see,” said Dane Jackson, who was videotaping the hail when a bolt of lightning struck his house on Grape Hill Road.

The lightning bolt left a 1-by-4-foot hole in his roof and shook the house with a sound that Jackson’s wife described as a bomb blast. Jackson said he was only startled.

“I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but my neighbor pointed to my roof,” Jackson said. “I saw a puff of smoke and some shingles coming down.”

Jackson, a Los Angeles city firefighter, said he was glad the lightning bolt caused only about $1,000 in damage.

The 31-year-old man initially feared that the lightning had harmed his 2-day-old daughter, who was sleeping in an upstairs bedroom of the two-story house. But she was still slumbering when he checked.

The heavy hailstorm resulted from a cold low-pressure system high in the atmosphere, said Dan Bowman, a meteorologist for WeatherData, which provides forecasts for The Times.

“If the temperature gets cold enough in those conditions, you get hail,” Bowman said.

About 50 to 60 lightning strikes were recorded in a few hours, he said.

Bowman predicted that the storm would be followed by “a fairly dry period.”

Other areas were sprinkled with light rain.

Southern California Edison Co. officials reported that one power pole in Ojai was struck by lightning at 2:15 p.m., leaving about 100 customers without electricity for several hours.

To many Upper Ojai residents, the storm was a spectacle.

Down the road from Jackson, Paul Hofmeister stood on California 150 watching motorists slow down to gape at the fields of snow. He said he has only seen such weather three times during his 39 years in the area.

“It hails a lot, but not to this degree,” he said. “The last time was 15 years ago.”

Neighbor Paul Deneen also stood outside his house south of the highway and watched his children as they romped in the snow.

“In the last two years there’s been fires and floods,” Deneen said. “Now this.”

His wife, Lauren, was also awed by the weather. “What else is there going to be?” she asked. “Tornadoes? Earthquakes?”

Others who heard about the unusual weather descended on the area in droves to romp, slide and wage snowball fights.

Santa Paula resident Naty Bedolla brought his five children and nieces out to play in the snow.

“We were going to Ojai, but we noticed there was a lot of hail here,” he said. “I just wanted to show them the snow.”

Bedolla left with a one-foot-tall snowman he had built on the top of his station wagon.

Pascual is a Times staff writer and Lee is a correspondent.