Heavy Rain Pummels the Region

The strongest storm of the winter hit Southern California late but hard Wednesday, firing bursts of heavy rain that knocked out power at the Glendale Galleria, flooded the Sepulveda Basin and snarled commuter traffic throughout the Los Angeles Basin.

The heaviest rain pounded the foothills of the Santa Monica, San Gabriel, San Bernardino and Santa Barbara mountains, with close to 3 inches reported in some areas by nightfall Wednesday.

While the San Fernando Valley got a relatively light amount of rain, Malibu reported 1 inch in just half an hour, and similar downpours were reported in canyons above Pasadena, Altadena, Hesperia and Santa Barbara.

Unlike years past, when fire-ravaged hillsides gave way in torrents of mud and debris, slopes generally held fast in Wednesday’s heavy rain, although a small mudslide did block several lanes at the junction of the Golden State and Antelope Valley freeways near Newhall.

The biggest problems on Wednesday occurred as flood-control channels filled to the brim with muddy runoff water.

A 13-year-old boy who told a friend he wanted to test the speed of a rain-swollen channel at Santa Clarita Park about 3:50 p.m. slipped in and was swept away in the current, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Wayne Waterman said. The boy managed to climb to safety a half mile downstream and walk to a drug store, where he called his parents.

Waterman warned people to stay away from swollen washes: “You never know. This kid just slipped and fell in.”

Four hours later, there was another--a man who dove into a creek at Valley Ranch and Sand Canyon roads in Santa Clarita to try to save his dog, which was being swept away. Both the man and dog were fished out by Los Angeles County firefighters, and the man refused treatment, Fire Inspector Greg Cleveland said.

Lt. James Turner of the San Gabriel Police Department said the flooding occurred there when the Rubio Wash flood control channel--which collects runoff from San Marino and Pasadena--began overflowing its banks at midday. Water from the channel spilled over onto several neighborhood streets below the San Gabriel Country Club, leaving intersections awash and several basements flooded.

Rising waters prompted the Army Corps of Engineers to close roads in the Sepulveda Flood Control Basin, but it was reopened Wednesday evening as the rain slackened.

Despite a rash of rain-related fender-benders, few serious traffic accidents were reported.

Among the most serious was a crash involving a school bus ferrying 40 students from Granada Hills High School that spun out of control on the eastbound Simi Valley Freeway west of Laurel Canyon Boulevard. One 18-year-old student suffered minor injuries in the 12:40 p.m. crash, and the pregnant driver was taken to Holy Cross Medical Center for observation, then released.

About an hour earlier, a 10-vehicle, chain-reaction crash closed three lanes of the southbound Golden State Freeway past McBean Parkway in Valencia, CHP Officer Wendy Moore said. The crash began when a pickup spun out of control and was hit by a car, leading to a pileup involving three big trucks and a Greyhound bus with 25 passengers. No one was seriously injured in the crash.

Scattered power outages were reported throughout the area, but service generally was restored within a few hours. The Glendale Galleria and other businesses in downtown Glendale were dark for about 10 minutes early Wednesday afternoon after the storm’s winds knocked out power lines, Glendale police said.

Rob Kaczmarek, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., which supplies information to The Times, said the rain was coming from a large, relatively warm storm system, born in tropical waters near Hawaii, that ambled slowly across the eastern Pacific toward the mainland.

Originally expected to strike California late Tuesday, the storm stalled about 500 miles off the coast, taunting forecasters by refusing to move onshore as anticipated.

After issuing a flash-flood watch for the Santa Barbara area at 6:45 p.m. Tuesday, National Weather Service forecasters had second thoughts, rescinding the watch two hours later and conceding that “only scattered rain showers” were expected in Southern California for the rest of the night.

But Wednesday they got the full show--with 0.98 of an inch in Woodland Hills as of 4:30 p.m., 2 inches at the Los Angeles Civic Center and 2.8 inches in San Gabriel, where basements flooded.

The downpour not only made commuting a nightmare, it was bad for business at the Headline Salon in Woodland Hills, where receptionist Lillian Dickinson said clients were opting to suffer through another bad-hair day rather than subject their new dos to the elements.

Dickinson said people are too afraid of rain: “It takes longer for nail polish to dry with all the moisture in the air, but your skin loves it.”

That skin has been suffering recently. The rain at the Civic Center raised the total for the season--which runs from July 1 through June 30--to 4.52 inches, well below the normal season’s total for the date of 7.84 inches.

However, because of conservation measures, careful planning and much heavier precipitation in the northern half of the state--from which Southern California gets much of its drinking and irrigation water--reservoirs are full and water officials say there’s no need to worry about a drought, at least not yet.

Kaczmarek said the rain should taper off here by this afternoon as the storm heads east into Arizona and Nevada. He said the clearing trend should continue through Saturday, but skies are expected to start clouding over again late Sunday.

“We might see some more rain Sunday night or Monday morning,” he said.

Felina Shvarts is not looking forward to that. Owner of the Happy Childhood home day-care center in Woodland Hills, Shvarts spent Wednesday trying to keep six stir-crazy toddlers entertained, unable to let them work off their energy playing outdoors.

“You have to be prepared to change the activities every five to 10 minutes,” she said. “And I try to make staying inside sound like something fun. I don’t just hand them a bunch of puzzles. I tell them ‘Guys, guess what? Today we are going to do something different. We are going to do puzzles!”

Malnic is a Times staff writer and Riccardi a correspondent. Times staff writers John Johnson and Lisa Leff also contributed to this story.