Lingering Rain Adds to Traffic Woes

For the third straight day, rain pelted Southern California on Wednesday, causing hundreds of accidents, one of them fatal, and a bus crash that injured 13 people.

Almost 3 1/2 inches of rain had fallen in downtown Los Angeles since Monday, bringing the season’s totals to more than two inches above normal. The storm was expected to pass through the area Wednesday night, with cloudy weather forecast for this morning and partly sunny conditions in the afternoon.

“This was a stubborn storm system,” said Curtis Brack, a meteorologist for WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times. “The main part of the storm system passed through the area Wednesday, but an area of low-level moisture stayed over much of Southern California and kept the showers and light drizzle going through the day.”

The light rain again slowed the morning and evening commutes, causing minor accidents and 10 SigAlerts. But traffic flowed better Wednesday than on the previous two days, when there were mudslides and massive multi-car tie-ups.

“Monday it was out of control, Tuesday was a problem, but [Wednesday] it hasn’t been as bad,” said California Highway Patrol spokesman Richard Perez. “The rain caused the commute to move slower than usual and caused accidents, but it’s not as bad as it was.”

In the Cheviot Hills area of Los Angeles, the driver of a speeding car lost control on the slick roads and struck a power pole about 2:30 a.m. UCLA student Arturo Gomez, 20, of Reseda was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.

About 9 a.m. Wednesday, on Florence Avenue in Bell, an MTA bus crashed into a minivan, which had stalled on the street after hitting another car. Eleven bus passengers and a passenger from the car and the minivan were injured, four of them seriously, authorities said.

“The rain was definitely a factor,” said Los Angeles County Fire Department spokesman Henry Rodriguez. “The roads were very slick, which makes it difficult to stop and causes a lot of sliding.”

The rest of the week is expected to be dry, forecasters said.

“Throughout the week the weather will be slowly warming up,” Brack said. “By the weekend, it should be warmer than usual. It should be a beautiful weekend.”

In Malibu, officials kept a close watch on the charred hillsides, but no major problems were reported.

The storm delighted Ventura County citrus farmers because the rain deeply irrigated their trees, but it worried flood control officials who were concerned about houses tucked in low-lying areas and beneath sopping hillsides.

Ventura County officials said three days of stormy weather have saturated the ground with rain, beginning to replenish the county’s reservoirs but also threatening more homes with flood waters and mudslides. So far, this week’s drenching has flooded homes and garages in the tiny community of El Rio, where storm runoff backed up in a half-completed drainage pipe.

In the beach-side community of La Conchita, one household reported some oozing surface mud, but county engineers and geologists found no evidence of slippage where the steep hill unleashed a massive mudslide in 1995 that destroyed several homes.

Times staff writer Kenneth R. Weiss contributed to this story.