1 Fatality Blamed on Downpour : Storm: Woman in Chatsworth is struck and killed in crosswalk. Snow closes freeway, schools, city halls in north county.

And the rain kept tumbling down.

For the second day in a row, high winds and rain buffeted the San Fernando Valley area, snarling traffic and causing at least one fatal accident.

So much snow fell Wednesday in northern Los Angeles County that children were sent home from school and the Antelope Valley Mall closed mid-afternoon.

Farther north, the Golden State Freeway was closed in both directions near Gorman, leaving confused commuters stranded in whipping winds. Santa Clarita motels were clogged with commuters who didn’t dare brave the icy northern highways.

In Chatsworth, a woman was struck by two cars and killed as she crossed De Soto Avenue at Lemarsh Street in the rain about 5:30 p.m., Los Angeles Police Sgt. Glenn Wiggins said. The second car did not stop, Wiggins said. Authorities had not identified the victim by Wednesday evening, but said she appeared to be in her late teens or early 20s.

Throughout Los Angeles County, 520 collisions occurred between 5 a.m. and noon, with 145 in the West Valley reported to the California Highway Patrol between 5 a.m. and 4 p.m.

At Castaic, big rig trucks, cars, motor homes and other vehicles jammed the streets near the Golden State Freeway. Shoulders on both sides were packed bumper-to-bumper with hundreds of cars.

“I guess we’ll spend the night in the truck,” said Crucita Gonzalez, 26, a Fresno resident returning from a vacation to Mexico with her husband and two children.

She was huddled under the awning of a 7-Eleven with a dozen other stranded motorists. In front of the store, a clerk was passing out free cups of coffee, which were grabbed as quickly as he could deliver them.

“We’re already making a ton of money,” said the employee, who declined to give his name. “They’re freezing their butts off.”

The town’s two motels were booked full by early evening, and employees were referring motorists to other hotels near Six Flags Magic Mountain near Valencia.

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Phylisa Hickman, 35, of Merced managed to check in to the Comfort Inn with her three children. “We ate at Tommy’s. I told them it was a famous place,” said Hickman, checking out a VCR at the inn. “Then we just went to our room and warmed up.”

Snowbound stretches of the Angeles Forest and Angeles Crest highways near Antelope Valley were also closed, as three inches of snow blanketed the lower deserts and two feet fell in the mountains.

In the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, residents and outdoorsmen battled the deluge. Young Chun held a bright orange umbrella in one hand and a shovel in the other. He scooped out dirt from a Topanga Canyon hill to build a makeshift dike, hoping to divert the torrents of water streaming into the parking lot of his health food store.

Two hunters undeterred by the foul weather went out to bag some wild geese in the Santa Clarita Valley: They got their bird, but one of the hunters had to be rescued by firefighters when he ventured into the swollen Santa Clara River to retrieve the fallen fowl.

Although eyes were on fire-scarred slopes that threatened to turn into rivers of mud, no mudslides were reported by Wednesday night. There were power outages in Granada Hills, West Hills and Canoga Park, but they were not severe, said Mindy Berman, a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power spokeswoman.

Still, the torrents turned business as usual into a muddy mess for hundreds of thousands of residents, with roads, freeways and schools closing.

Winds gusted up to 35 m.p.h. in Burbank, and in Studio City, a powerful gust knocked a tree onto the roof of Leo Ward’s new car.

About 3,000 Cal State Northridge employees and 1,000 winter session students were sent home early Wednesday afternoon as the roads grew slicker. “The university’s fine,” spokeswoman Carmen Ramos Chandler said. “The concern is people going home, to or from the university. The concern is that they get home safely and not risk their lives to come here.”

She said CSUN will have regular hours today.

There was reason to be concerned. “It’s real bad out there,” CHP Officer Tito Gomez said. “There are a ton of accidents.”

In the snow-filled Antelope Valley, disabled and smashed cars lined the sides of roads.

The Sepulveda Basin near the Sepulveda Dam was roped off as water edged above the “precautionary” level that police have set for closing the area. Mulholland Drive at Topanga Canyon Boulevard was also flooded, and jackknifed trucks clogged the Golden State Freeway at San Fernando Road and Magic Mountain Parkway for almost five hours Wednesday morning and early afternoon.

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In the Antelope Valley foothills, the Westside Union School District evacuated students and staff in the early afternoon, and the Antelope Valley Union High School District closed early in the wake of the snow--along with the Antelope Valley Mall, Palmdale City Hall and all Palmdale parks and recreation services.

George Reams, superintendent of Westside Union, said students fled snow-clogged campuses eagerly.

“There’s not a tear-filled eye among them,” Reams said. “Of course, what they don’t realize is that they’ll have to make it up at the end of the year.”

Other administrators held fast.

“I’ve lived in snow before. One inch of snow is not a big deal,” said David Alvarez, superintendent of the Lancaster School District, who kept students in school until the usual time Wednesday.

“Two to three feet of snow is a problem,” he said, adding that the schools may be closed today if the snow continues piling up.

In the canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains, workers kept a sharp eye out for mudslides, particularly in fire-ravaged areas such as Topanga Canyon. “Anything that doesn’t have brush holding it down” can become a mudslide, and the slopes in Topanga Canyon lost much of their brush in the 1993 fires, County Fire Inspector Gary Sutter said.

Rocks did slide down the canyon slopes, but by late afternoon, there were still no mudslides. However, tire-sized boulders that had tumbled down the hills were scattered across Saddle Peak Road, blocking traffic.

Public works employees sat idly in their cars along the canyon, watching swollen Topanga Creek and waiting for something to happen. They warned gawkers away from an embankment crumbling into the creek in the 600 block of Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

But the weather didn’t scare off the most aggressive outdoorsmen.

Steven Konrady, 18, of Hawthorne and Rick Carbajal, 23, of Westchester arrived at the Santa Clara River about 10:30 a.m., about five miles west of the Golden State Freeway, for a day of goose hunting. Konrady said the foul weather makes for great fowl hunting: “They stay down and don’t fly.”

Konrady crossed the river about 11 a.m., when the water was still knee-deep, and shot a goose a short time later. When the bird fell into the river, Konrady acted instinctively.

“Being a hunter, I wasn’t about to let it get away so, stupid me, I jumped in the river after it,” he said.

But the unexpectedly high river, nearly hip-deep by now, swept Konrady about 20 yards downstream before he grabbed a tree and pulled himself out--still clutching the eight-pound goose. He was stranded on the opposite side of the 100-foot-wide river, too far from Carbajal to talk to him.

The pair hiked down the riverbank, on opposite sides, for about four miles until Carbajal spotted the Schwartz Oil Co. facility about one mile west of the Golden State Freeway. Tony Lopez, an employee at the company, grabbed a rope and went back with Carbajal to the river to try to rescue Konrady, who was still stuck on the wrong side of the river. Other employees phoned authorities for help.

This time, it was Carbajal who got stuck. He made it about halfway across toward his friend before the rapidly moving water forced him to remain on a sandbar until firefighters arrived.

“I could just see death,” he said.

The water was hip-deep in some areas by the time Los Angeles County Fire Department rescuers arrived, Inspector Mark Savage said. Firefighter Tom Overstreet, using a rope tied around his waist as a harness, reached the sandbar and helped rig a line to allow Carbajal to reach shore.

“The waters were really moving,” Overstreet said. “It wasn’t passable without a rope.”

A helicopter rescued Konrady and his prize goose from the opposite bank just before 2 p.m. Afterward, waiting for a ride back to his car, he said he planned to eat the bird, probably after taking a few hours to admire it.

“I don’t know if it was worth it,” Konrady said, “but we’re alive, we’re safe.”

Times staff writers Nicholas Riccardi and Errol Cockfield Jr. contributed to this story. Guzman is a staff writer and Sabbatini is a correspondent.