Storm Troopers : Labor: Rain makes some jobs unbearable. For police officers, mail carriers, school crossing guards and others, there is no escape.

As a cop on the streets of Los Angeles, John Amott has his share of troubles--the gangsters, thieves and drive-by boys.

Then there’s the thing that causes him the most dread, the one that takes him by storm: the rain.

It’s those nasty days where the wind-whipped torrents come at him sideways to slap his face, stinging his lips, jabbing his skin like gray needles as he hunkers down over his motorcycle on the rain-dashed freeway.

And those endless hours he directs traffic in the midst of a downpour, when his department-issue slicker has sprung its usual leaks and the rainwater runs relentlessly down his back, mixing with his own steamy sweat, making him feel as uncomfortable as some water-logged spaceman on the surface of Venus.

“On those rainy days, it’s no thrill to be a cop,” said the 49-year-old Amott, a sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department’s motorcycle division. “You can never get dry. You’re miserable because you’ve got nowhere to run, nowhere to hide from the rain.

“But you’ve got to stay out in it, feeling like some dummy in a plastic jumpsuit. It’s not until you get home, take a hot shower and get into bed that you can escape the rain and its chills. That’s the only time you get dry.”

On days like Wednesday, when the storm clouds unleash their rainy wrath, most people can snap open an umbrella, head for shelter, stay at the office. Or never leave the house.

But there are also folks with no respite from the whims of inclement weather--the garbage men, school crossing guards, utility workers, telephone linemen and traffic cops whose work demands that they remain on the job, come rain or shine.

Some, like sewer workers, have to slosh through the torrent’s aftermath as it races through storm drains far below city streets. Others, like the utility men and telephone linemen, have to dance delicately around their work, fearing the jolt of electrocution.

Then there’s Bob Jackson, who has to slog through the worst that the rain has to offer.

“I think the motto goes something like ‘Come rain, sleet, snow or dark of night--We deliver,’ ” says the wispy-bearded Chatsworth mailman. “But that doesn’t mean we have to like it.”

Sometimes, when walking his 350-home delivery route, Jackson feels like he needs four hands just to stay afloat--one for the large packages and letters, one to fish in his pockets, and two in a losing effort to keep the mail dry.

He feels like Charlie Brown with his own, personal storm cloud looming overhead, the raindrops running off the brim of his rubber hat, smearing the addresses on the personal letters, soaking many envelopes clean through.

In the rain, he can’t take his old shortcuts across the squishy, slippery lawns that can bring a carrier to his knees--or worse. So Jackson presses on, thinking about days at the beach, counting off the houses like sheep on a sleepless night, until that last letter has been laid to rest.

“The only good thing about rainy days? There are a lot less dogs on the route,” he says. “They’re not dumb. They’re all inside where it’s warm and dry.”

On wet days, Maria Witer gets worried sick over her job, fretting that some small child will slip along slick sidewalks and crosswalks. So the school crossing guard hovers like a mother duck, her brood in tow.

Most of her time, though, is spent standing in the rain, waiting for her kiddies to come.

“This morning was absolutely unbearable,” Witer, 44, a crossing guard for Noble Elementary School, said Wednesday after helping more than 100 children cross on their way to classes. “No lie. I had on six sweaters, my thermal underwear and my double socks and it still didn’t make a difference. The rain chilled me to the bone.”

Witer, who was born in Argentina, has been a crossing guard for seven years. She has become used to the San Fernando Valley’s cruel summer heat, its dense smog and impatient drivers.

But she will never, ever get used to the rain and its chill.

“I’m still numb,” she says a full hour after the last child has been safely delivered. “At 7:15 a.m., I don’t feel my lips anymore. I can’t speak. It’s too uncomfortable.”

Some days, her assigned corner at Vanalden Avenue and Napa Street has flooded so badly that she must carry the children across, one by one. Sympathetic neighbors bring her hot coffee. But she still can’t get warm.

“Sometimes I’m in pain,” she says. “But you can’t leave or else you lose your job. Anyway, I don’t trust my kids to anyone else. So, I’m stuck at that corner, like I’m wearing some rain-soaked ball and chain.”

In the storm drains far below Witer’s corner hangout, Robert Potter sloshes through the storm’s murky harvest along with his colleagues from the city’s waste water collection division.

Potter is a sewer worker, part of the division’s confined space entry team that delves into the sewer and storm-drain conduits to keep things running smoothly.

On a rainy day in Los Angeles, more than 15 billion gallons of rainwater rush toward the sea, a dangerous underground torrent that Potter and others must somehow maneuver--keeping watch for the foot-long tree rats that can snap and bite if cornered.

“Rainy days are a headache,” he says. “There’s just so much water down there, little problems become big ones. My job becomes 10 times more dangerous.”

For surface workers as well, the downpours bring a real threat of lethal danger. They are people like Terry Carson, a telephone service technician who often works atop swaying telephone poles, handling testy live wires with fingers numb from the rain.

He knows that even for a 20-year veteran, one slip-up can send him careening down a slivery, wooden telephone pole--a dreaded mishap that’s known among linemen as “burning a pole.”

Other workers know they don’t have to get wet to get stressed.

Bus drivers must cope with harried zigzagging cars constantly cutting in front of their lumbering six-ton buses--all while passengers scream, laugh and jostle inside.

Pedestrians also sprint wildly for the bus in the rain, newspapers and umbrellas covering their faces, blocking their vision--reckless street runners who often slip and slide right underneath the bus.

“One woman came running down this hill for the bus and fell right as she got there, her dress flying right up around her neck,” Maceo Bethel, division transportation manager for Southern California Rapid Transit, recalled of his bus-driving days.

“Everybody who got on the bus sort of went to her side to have a look, so the bus started leaning. She looked up and saw these faces pressed to the glass and was so embarrassed she just got up and walked back up the hill.

“Now that woman had a bad day in the rain.”

Come hell and high water, Sgt. Amott yearns for sunnier days.

That’s when he can forget the treacherous freeway mist kicked up by the big semis, blinding him as he tools along on his motorcycle.

At night, though, after a long day in the rain, he can still feel himself standing in the downpour, weighed down by his holster, weapon and bulletproof vest, as the rain washes over him like the sky’s own river.

“A warm, dry bed,” he said, “never felt so good.”