Strong Storm Lands Its First Punch in Region

A powerful Arctic storm moved inland over Southern California on Thursday, and officials warned of mudslides in burn areas, severe thunderstorms in the coastal valleys, urban flooding and gale-force winds.

Rain falling at a rate of more than half an inch an hour was reported in Santa Barbara County as the main force of the storm headed for the Los Angeles area. Heavy snow was falling in the mountains, threatening to block some of the main highways to the north.

Gale-force winds were recorded in several areas, and strong gusts on the Westside shorted out power lines during the afternoon, cutting electrical service to about 2,400 customers. Fire officials said a small tornado touched down briefly in Santa Barbara, flattening a structure.

Forecasters said there would probably be some heavy downpours and hail the size of walnuts in Los Angeles County before the storm begins to ease sometime tonight.

“It’s going to be nasty,” said Debra Rominger, a National Weather Service forecaster. “It’s a pretty strong one.”

Inspector Rick Moreno, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Fire Department, said the hardest-hit areas “probably will be those that burned in last fall’s firestorms. We have no idea how bad it’s going to be. . . .”

Moreno said fire personnel were at the ready throughout the county.

“We’ve beefed up our forces,” he said. “We’ve deployed extra search-and rescue people and several swift-water rescue teams. We want to anticipate the worst.”

In the Pasadena Glen area--where several homes were invaded by mudslides in February after brush fires destroyed dozens of homes and stripped hillsides of vegetation last fall--most of the residents left their homes Thursday afternoon rather that wait for the mudslides they were sure were coming.

Barriers were in place--many of them heavy wooden walls anchored to sturdy steel poles that county flood control crews had erected to divert the anticipated runoff away from the homes and into newly paved flood-control channels.

“There’s not a lot more we can do,” Bob Dean, a federal soil conservationist, said Thursday afternoon as the first scattered drops began falling from the rapidly darkening sky. “We’re kind of sitting here now, waiting to be of assistance.”

Jim Paul, a 65-year-old retiree who lives with his dog, Biff, in an 18-foot trailer on the lot where his house burned to the ground last fall, sounded a philosophical note.

“I’m just going to stay up on the hill and watch it all fly by,” Paul said. “I’ve lived up here for 37 years. It gets exciting at times. We get to see a lot of nature, only sometimes nature goes on a rampage.”

In Malibu, another area where disastrous brush fires during the fall were followed my destructive mudslides in February, emergency crews and residents did last-minute checks of sandbag barriers, wooden barricades and storm drains as the storm approached.

At Big Rock Drive and Pacific Coast Highway, one of the worst-hit areas during previous storms, city employees inspected a new six-foot drainage pipe that is expected to handle most of the runoff from the denuded hills above.

Bulldozers stood ready along Las Flores Canyon Road, another area hit hard in February’s storms.

Sarah Maurice, a spokeswoman for the city of Malibu, said the city notified residents to prepare for another storm, but added: “We don’t want them to have a false sense of security, because a fire or sheriff official probably won’t come knocking on their door to tell them to get out. If they feel they are in danger, they probably are and should just get out.”

Such warnings are old hat in Malibu, where most residents prefer to stick it out.

Michael Spack, who lives midway up Big Rock Drive, and was undaunted by the thrashing rain that hit by about 3 p.m.

“We’re keeping our fingers crossed, but the city got all the drains in and did some hydro-seeding so I am feeling pretty safe about it,” Spack said. “But if it’s more than 3 inches of rain, we’re all gonna float to the ocean.”

Bruce Thoren, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., said as much as three inches of rain is expected to fall in the coastal valleys and along the foothills before the storm moves out to the east, probably sometime Saturday.

He said there is a slight possibility of even more rain than that if the cold storm from the Gulf of Alaska hooks up with a broad band of subtropical moisture currently stretching from Hawaii to Baja California.

“Right now, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, but it could,” Thoren said.

The National Weather Service said the storm--unusually cold for this time of year--probably will drop between a foot and two feet of snow in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains by Saturday night. The snow level in some of the northern ranges is expected to dip as low as 2,500 feet--about the elevation of the floor of the Antelope Valley.

Times correspondent Kathleen Kelleher contributed to this story.