April Glowers and Whitens Parts of Southland With Snow, Hail

A cold, blustery storm system hopscotched across Southern California on Tuesday afternoon, drenching some areas with sudden downpours, peppering others with pea-sized hail and dusting San Dimas and Mission Hills with snow.

A funnel cloud was reported over the ocean south of Camp Pendleton, and several others were sighted near Bakersfield and in rural areas of Riverside and San Bernardino counties. None of the twisters touched down and there was no major damage.

The rain forced postponement of Tuesday night’s battle in the Medfly war, grounding helicopters scheduled to spray the Corona and Norco areas with the insecticide malathion.

Lightning strikes peppered Southern California, and several brief power outages were reported.

Although brief, heavy cloudbursts struck in Malibu and Altadena--areas stripped of ground cover during last fall’s devastating brush fires--there were no large mudslides and no reports of flooding.

The biggest surprise was the snow--unusual almost anywhere in Southern California at this time of year and especially rare in relatively low-lying areas of the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys.

In Mission Hills, Lee Ann Ercolono 32, watched two cars spin out on slushy Sepulveda Boulevard as she drove north toward the car dealership where she works.

“I stayed behind the bus and followed its tracks,” said Ercolono, who admitted she was a novice at driving in snow.

Across the street at the Hair Lib barbershop, Cassandra Phillips, 35, and her husband, Jesse Torres, 40, did what any thinking Southern Californians would do in an April blizzard: They broke out a camera to record the moment.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Phillips said. “Of course I’ve seen snow before, but not here.” In San Dimas, streets and yards turned white briefly under a short-lived dusting of snow.

“It’s basically all over San Dimas,” said Warren Toy, a deputy at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department substation there. “This is totally new to me.”

Curtis Brack, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., said the inclement weather was spawned by an unusually strong spring storm system.

“The jet stream has been driving straight south from Western Canada, pumping a lot of cold air into California,” Brack said. “When the cold air and moisture combine, you can get some snow, even in Southern California. The thundershowers generally were fast-moving, though, and they didn’t stick around long enough in any one place for anyone to get a lot of precipitation.”

Rainfall totals from the storm generally were light, with 0.71 of an inch reported in Anaheim, 0.70 in Woodland Hills, 0.56 in Monrovia, 0.45 in Beaumont, 0.37 in San Juan Capistrano, 0.29 in Pasadena, 0.20 in Redondo Beach and 0.06 in Long Beach.

The 24-hour total at the Los Angeles Civic Center on Tuesday night was 0.09 of an inch. That raised the season’s total to 7.65 inches, compared with the normal season’s total for the date of 14.47 inches. Yearly rainfall recording is based on a calendar that runs from July 1 through June 30.