Spring Storm Piles Up Traffic in South County

Massive pile-ups clogged south Orange County freeways, hail the size of golf balls piled up three inches deep in Fallbrook, and snow frosted the shores of Big Bear Lake as a late spring storm staged a hit-and-miss attack Friday afternoon on Southern California.

The blustery storm, which is expected to move on by this morning, was blamed for two traffic-stopping crashes on the northbound lanes of Interstate 5 near San Clemente.

The first accident, at about 2:25 p.m., involved 15 vehicles that banged together near the Avenida Pico exit, blocking all the northbound lanes, California Highway Patrol Officer Keith Bauer said.

Minutes later, about a mile north at the Avenida Palizada exit, two big-rigs jackknifed, spilling 200 gallons of diesel fuel and a payload of concrete onto the freeway, Bauer said.

Only minor injuries were reported in the two incidents, Bauer said. Northbound lanes at Avenida Pico were cleared by 4 p.m., but damage to the freeway from the concrete spill had all but one lane at Palizada closed into the evening.

Congestion was made worse by a tractor-trailer that flipped on nearby Ortega Highway at the San Juan Bridge in San Juan Capistrano in the hours before the two freeway crashes, Bauer said. It was pulling two other trailers loaded with sand. The accident closed Ortega Highway in both directions.

With two dozen other accidents in the same area Friday afternoon, CHP officials told callers not to expect an officer to assist them unless they were reporting an injury accident.

“With the big accidents, we just didn’t have enough officers to handle all the calls we were getting,” Bauer said.

Scattered showers, remnants of sporadic thunderstorms that had briefly pounded South County, were falling during each of the accidents and may have been a factor, although Bauer said that wet roads should not be blamed.

“Rain never causes crashes,” he said. “Driving too fast in the rain, following too closely in the rain, or driving unwisely in the rain causes accidents.”

The storm hit the Southland hardest in Orange, San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Some areas received no precipitation while others were drenched by brief downpours.

Almost half an inch of rain fell near San Juan Capistrano and 1 1/2 inches of snow piled up briefly at Big Bear Valley.

Meteorologists said the storm, unusual for this time of year, was generated by a large low-pressure system centered over the Arizona-California border. The system was expected to drift eastward by this morning, with only a slight chance of a few lingering showers in Orange County and the deserts this afternoon.

The Memorial Day weekend forecast for the county calls for partly cloudy skies with high temperatures in the upper 60s and lower 70s, said Rob Kaczmarek, a meteorologist for WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times. Expect some fog and low clouds in the morning, but the “afternoons should be pretty nice,” he said.

Overall, the meteorologist added, “it should be a pretty nice second half of the weekend.”