Sudden Storm Triggers Mudslides

A sudden storm swept the region Monday afternoon, clogging the Ortega Highway with mudslides, causing fender-benders throughout the county and knocking out some traffic signals but otherwise causing little damage.

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The black clouds that suddenly darkened county skies dumped as much as .43 inch of rain in 12 minutes shortly after 4 p.m. and prompted a flash flood watch for Orange County that was canceled several hours later, according to WeatherData.

Along the Ortega Highway, the late-afternoon deluge swept mud and rocks onto the roadway for miles, closing the entire Orange County stretch to traffic at about 4:30 p.m., a CHP spokeswoman said.

Caltrans crews worked into the night to reopen the highway.

Police departments throughout the county reported fender benders but no major accidents, and in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach, brief power outages knocked out traffic signals. By 6:30 p.m., however, traffic was moving smoothly.

“We just had everybody and their mother out on those (traffic) calls,” a Costa Mesa Police Department spokeswoman said. “But they were just little crashes.”

But in Los Angeles County, rescue workers continued searching into the night Monday for a father and son swept away by a flash flood near their home on Sunday.

John Henderson, 34, and his son Matthew, 9, were missing and feared dead after water swept them down Bailey Canyon, apparently burying them in the muddy depths of a catch basin.

Officials said Henderson and his son had been hiking with several dozen other people Sunday afternoon when thunderstorms began raking the fire-denuded highlands above them.

The hikers said they heard a terrible rumbling as the flash flood approached.

“There was no stream at all, maybe a half inch of water, and then this wall of water came down that you would not believe,” said Neill Southwick, 52, a retired mail carrier.

Eight of the hikers found themselves stranded on ledges and had to be rescued by helicopter.

For a while it seemed that everyone had made it to safety. It wasn’t until the rest of the hikers had left that rescuers noticed a lone car sitting empty in the park’s lot.

The search was scaled back at nightfall, but workers brought in backhoes and bulldozers to continue sifting through the muck in the catch basin after dark.

The thunderstorms that raked Southern California on Monday evening were largely unexpected.

Curtiss Brack, a meteorologist with WeatherData, which provides forecasts for The Times, said the problem was a storm system that was supposed to tiptoe out of the state during the day without causing much fuss.

“Instead, the storm system just slowed down and decided to sit still for a while,” he said. “It was a very active system.”

The forecast for today and Wednesday calls for patchy early-morning coastal fog, but otherwise mostly sunny skies, with highs in mid-60s to mid-70s, according to WeatherData.

Preliminary rainfall figures from the Orange County Environmental Management Agency show the storm hit particularly hard in South County, dropping .39 inch on Saddleback Peak, and .55 inch at one San Clemente site.

Santa Ana logged .28 inch of rain, .35 inch fell at the Villa Park Dam, and Laguna Beach got .12 inch. Brea and Seal Beach, however, logged less than .04 inch of rain, an EMA spokesman said.