Awash in Accidents : Downpour Wreaks Road Havoc as Some Areas Get Up to 5 Inches of Rain

Rain clouds barreling in from Hawaii lashed the Los Angeles region Tuesday, causing headaches for commuters tormented by roads clogged with accidents, covered with mud and closed because of flooding.

But forecasters, who were monitoring a second front swinging south from the Oregon coast, warned late in the day that the worst may be yet to come.

The damage inflicted was evident in the heavy volume of traffic accidents reported to the California Highway Patrol and police. There were at least two deaths. A 40-year-old Orange man died in an early morning spin-out on the Costa Mesa Freeway in Orange County and a man in his 60s was killed in a four-car crash in Granada Hills that left another man in critical condition.

Another collision disabled two loaded school buses at Pico Boulevard and Beverly Drive in West Los Angeles--two middle school students and a bus driver were treated for minor injuries--and a chain-reaction pileup on the Golden State Freeway damaged a vehicle driven by pop music star Barry Manilow.

By Tuesday afternoon, the storm had dumped more than 2.6 inches of rain at the Civic Center. But the foothills of the San Gabriel Valley and Ventura and Santa Barbara counties bore the brunt of the drenching, with some areas reporting four to five inches of rainfall in 24 hours.

The downpour quickly compensated for what had been an unusually dry winter. While rainfall in Los Angeles had reached only half its normal level for the season Monday, by Tuesday afternoon the area had received 70% of its seasonal average.

“This storm has really done some work,” said Bruce Rockwell, a National Weather Service meteorologist. “It would be very rare to go from a very dry year to an average year with one storm, but we are within striking distance.”

According to Rockwell, the storm system could drop two to four more inches on the region Wednesday and cause sporadic thunderstorms before blowing south Thursday.

Tuesday was a hectic morning for the CHP. Between 5 and 9 a.m. the CHP received 268 accident calls, a spokesman said. By contrast, last Tuesday--during dry, balmy weather--there were only 67 incidents during the morning commute period.

At 1:20 a.m., a truck fell from a Golden State Freeway overpass and landed on the Pasadena Freeway at Figueroa Street, resulting in the closing of the northbound Pasadena Freeway for the next 5 1/2 hours. Overturned large trucks caused two freeway closures. One carrying fertilizer shut down the eastbound Artesia Freeway near the Long Beach Freeway transition, and the northbound Santa Ana Freeway at Culver was closed when a truck spilled a load of lemons.

The first weather-related fatality occurred about 4:30 a.m. when Gerald Silver, 40, of Orange lost control of his car on the northbound Costa Mesa Freeway at La Veta Avenue. The tires on Silver’s car were in poor condition, CHP officials said.

Even during the usually calm midday period, the highways were dotted with disabled vehicles. Between noon and 2:30 p.m., the CHP communications center received 296 calls reporting accidents, a spokesman said. “That’s definitely a lot of action,” said CHP spokesman Pablo Torres.

The fender-bender involving Barry Manilow occurred about 12:20 p.m. on the southbound Golden State Freeway at 4th Street. Manilow was driving alone in his four-door Range Rover when a large truck set off a chain reaction of collisions by rear-ending the car behind Manilow.

The two school buses, carrying about 60 students between the ages of 11 and 13, collided about 2:20 p.m. One bus rear-ended the other when its brakes failed.

“It was a weather-related accident,” said Diana Munatones, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The buses were taking the students from Emerson Middle School in West Los Angeles to East and South-Central Los Angeles.

Across the region, debris and pools of water closed portions of heavily traveled roads. In the San Fernando Valley, localized flooding closed a lane of the Simi Valley Freeway at Tampa Avenue for two hours. Hazardous conditions also slowed traffic on the Angeles Crest Highway when rocks and mud tumbled into the road.

Treacherous storm waters threatened an 8-year-old boy who had to be rescued from a Saugus wash after he became stuck in knee-deep mud. Jason Marrow of Saugus was treated for mild hypothermia after Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies dug him out of the muck shortly after 4:30 p.m.

A minor mudslide on railroad tracks in Summerland, near Santa Barbara, halted an Amtrak train bound for Los Angeles from Portland on Tuesday evening. Passengers waited aboard the stalled train for an hour while railway employees inspected the tracks, which were mud-free, an Amtrak spokesman said. The train resumed its journey at 6:45 p.m. and was expected to arrive an hour late in Los Angeles.

Times staff writer Miles Corwin and correspondent Stephanie Brommer contributed to this story.