A Chilly Rain Breaks Record of 66 Years

It hadn’t happened to this extent since 1929, but on Friday people here battled the bizarre: rain and chilly temperatures in the middle of June.

The unseasonable weather broke a 66-year-old record, forced the closure of the Six Flags water park near Valencia just hours after its grand opening, triggered a small landslide in Glendale, left a dusting of snow at Frazier Park and caused a slew of minor traffic accidents.

“The big disappointment for us is that the guests came up here and were excited about opening day and now they are disappointed,” said Bonnie Rabjohn, a Six Flags California spokeswoman. “But, I mean, you can’t control the weather. Just another day in paradise.”

This is the time of the year when Los Angeles normally lives up to its fun-in-the-sun, it-never-rains image. The normal rainfall for June is zero and the normal temperature is 78 degrees, said Gene Van Cor, spokesman for the National Weather Service.

“This is our driest month,” he said.

But by noon Friday, the weather had forced everybody--especially Angelenos--to face a harsh reality: Not only does it rain in Southern California, it rains in June.

“We’ve already gotten .22 of an inch,” Van Cor said. “That’s a new record.” By 5:30, Woodland Hills had received .47 of an inch.

Back in 1929 the city received only 0.15 of an inch of rain on June 16. That was the record for the date until now.

In Frazier Park, beside Interstate 5 just north of the Los Angeles County line, rangers were greeted with a light, early-morning snow--the first June snow since 1988. It melted by afternoon.

In Glendale, at 2:43 p.m., children were moved away from a crack in a retaining wall around Verdugo Woods Elementary School. Police said mud accumulated behind the wall, but did not reach the campus.

Nearby, one residence at the east end of Hillside Drive suffered the collapse of its driveway and a rear retaining wall, and a nearby retaining wall cracked. A landslide was reported behind a location in the 2000 block of North Verdugo Avenue, a police spokeswoman said.

Resident Craig Matsuda said the problem was created when construction workers repairing the lining of a nearby wash left a large mound of debris. When the rain started, the mound channeled the water toward the retaining wall.

“My property had about eight feet of shrub and large trees, and it’s all in the wash,” Matsuda said. The water threatened a concrete pad on which Matsuda parked his car.

The area suffered sporadic power outages, but no major streets were blocked and no homes damaged, Glendale Police Agent Linda Reynolds said. Police advised residents to move their cars from Hillside.

“We’re just trying to keep an eye on things,” Reynolds said.

The storm system responsible for the rain and snow came out of the Gulf of Alaska and dropped down the West Coast, said meteorologist Curtis Brack of WeatherData, which provides forecasts for The Times.

“The only explanation is that there’s a very strong ridge of high pressure centered over the eastern half of the nation. That’s such a strong blocking force the storms coming out of Alaska have no place to go except drop south.”

Storms like the one that hit Los Angeles this week typically unleash their fury in the northern Plains states, which is the “normal course for this time of year,” Van Cor said.

“Instead it continued to dip south and got stuck in California for the last 48 hours,” he said of the storm bringing the rain and the cold.

So on a day when Southern Californians sported umbrellas and splashed in puddles, people in Williston, N.D., about 40 miles south of the Canadian border, basked in temperatures of 96 degrees. June is typically that area’s wettest month, Van Cor said.

Friday afternoon it was 48 degrees in Canoga Park and 54 degrees in Burbank and Van Nuys.

“The weather is upside down,” Van Cor said.

In the topsy-turvy weather, the heavily publicized Six Flags Hurricane Harbor opened Friday in Valencia, but not for long. By noon, fewer than 100 people had paid for admission to the 14-acre water park, and Six Flags officials decided to close it at 2 p.m.

“We had a big opening with balloon arches and Bugs Bunny and a band, but the rain dampened that a tad,” Rabjohn said.

Guests were given rain checks and free admission to the neighboring Magic Mountain, which remained open into the afternoon.

The rain was expected to begin moving out of California, headed east and northeast, by Saturday.

Forecasters predicted sunshine by Saturday afternoon and temperatures in the 70s.

“Tomorrow will be nice,” Van Cor said Friday.

Staff writers David Wharton, Nicholas Riccardi, Eric Slater and Maki Becker contributed to this story

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June Chill

Today’s high temperature (57 as of 4 p.m.) was the coldest June high on record in Burbank.

The coldest high temperatures in June recorded in Burbank (records go back to 1940):

June 16, 1995: 57 degrees

June 10, 1963: 59 degrees

June 1, 1965: 60 degrees

June 15, 1962: 61 degrees

June 21, 1945: 61 degrees

June 25, 1965: 62 degrees

Source: WeatherData Inc.