Offshore Squall Is Blamed for 1st Rainfall of the New Season

The first showers of the new rainy season peppered Ventura County early Wednesday, sprinkling local cropland and dumping up to a quarter of an inch of rain across the Topatopa Mountains.

Weather forecasters blamed an offshore Pacific squall for the brief rainfall, which dampened roadways and slowed commutes, but caused no serious accidents.

“This is the time of the year when we typically start to see our first rains of the season,” said Joe Dandrea, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

“This was kind of a small one that just sneaked in.”

High temperatures will remain in the upper 60s and overnight lows will dip to the mid-50s throughout the week, about normal for this time of year, forecasters said.

But by week’s end, more rain may hit Southern California.

“We have what appears to be a more significant system coming down from the Pacific Northwest,” Dandrea said. “It may drop down through Northern California or it may curve to the southeast and we’ll just get a glancing blow out of it.”

David Buettner, chief deputy agricultural commissioner for the county, said the light rainfall Wednesday was not likely to create a problem for those harvesting the area’s row and vegetable crops.

“If anything, the impact would be fairly minimal,” he said. “We haven’t had any reports of any damage and, without substantial rains, there usually aren’t any.”

The early morning showers Wednesday were the first raindrops across Ventura County since late in the spring, when a brutal series of storms swelled rivers and pushed thousands of tons of mud across the Oxnard Plain.

One person was killed and dozens of others were injured as a result of fierce January and March rains that also caused a landslide in La Conchita and millions of dollars in damage elsewhere in Ventura County.

Flood control officials are crossing their fingers that the upcoming rainy season, which began Oct. 1, will not match last year.

“We really have no accurate way of predicting what the future holds, but it looks like it may shape up to be a normal or below-normal water year,” said John Weikel, an engineer with the Ventura County Flood Control Department.

“It’s highly unusual to have two real wet years back to back,” he said.

Dolores Taylor, the county’s hydrologist, said no one gets nervous about ground saturation until 10 or more inches of rain have fallen in the season. But in areas like La Conchita, where nine homes were destroyed by the March landslide, residents should be prepared.

“La Conchita is still an unstable situation,” she said. “But last year, we had 13 or 14 inches of rain by the time the hill slipped, and I would expect we would get at least some of that this year before we start getting nervous.”

Taylor said the canyon areas that were so saturated and shaken last year by the slide will erode easier this year, adding that runoff could be heavy.

County crews have been cleaning out flood control basins to make sure that channels are cleared of branches and other debris so that water can flow through to the ocean without flooding nearby property.

In addition, the county is planning to have heavy equipment remove silt that has built up in Calleguas Creek south of Hueneme Road. Debris in catch basins along Santa Paula Creek and the Santa Clara River will also be cleaned out, Taylor said.

Landowners and county officials have teamed up to build dirt berms along San Antonio Creek near Ojai, where floodwaters damaged homes, barns and roads last winter.

“That’s so people won’t have water streaming through their horse barns,” Taylor said.

Many of the hills around Ventura County have retained much of the moisture left over from last season, when the county received twice its annual rainfall, Taylor said.

“Usually October is the driest month; all of our streams dry up,” she said. “But this year, all the little streams are still running.”

Miller is a Times staff writer and McDonald is a correspondent.