A Year’s Worth of Weather in a Day

Brent Maire didn’t know what to make of the odd and contradictory weather reports he was hearing from employees around Southern California on Monday.

“It was a little bizarre,” said Maire, general manager of the Tommy’s Original World Famous Hamburgers chain. “Our supervisors in the field in Orange County were saying the sun was out and the weather was real nice. Someone else up in Burbank and the Valley was saying it was hailing. So it was a little bit on the weird side.”

Weird, to say the least. The Los Angeles area got doses of sun, rain, thunder, lightning, wind and a freaky hailstorm--sometimes in the same neighborhood within an hour or so.

The speed of change caught many Angelenos by surprise, and without umbrellas. Presidents Day holiday travelers were similarly stunned, especially by a fresh layer of snow in the San Bernardino Mountains. But children were delighted by the rare spectacle of marble-sized hail pelting city streets.

The San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys bore the brunt of the holiday storm, which struck suddenly in midafternoon, quickly turning blue skies ominously dark and unleashing fierce winds, booming thunder and flashes of lightning.

The storm lasted no more than 45 minutes and ended as suddenly as it began. But it was dramatic, accompanied by temperatures that dropped in minutes in some spots from the mid-60s to the mid-40s and winds that were clocked at 32 mph in Long Beach and 45 mph in Oxnard.

The cause was a fast-moving cold front that moved southeast from Northern California, said Curtis Brack, meteorologist for WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times.

The front’s speed ensured that “any one spot won’t get too much rain,” he said. And the storm should be across the Mexican border by early today, he added.

The WeatherData forecast for today calls for mostly sunny skies with temperatures in the mid-60s at the Los Angeles Civic Center, but with some remaining gusts of winds out of the north between 20 and 35 mph.

The unusual hail at the Hillcrest Country Club on the Westside drove golfers inside but drew receptionist Judy Hastings outdoors for a few minutes. The size of “rabbit pellets,” the hail was the first she could recall seeing in Los Angeles in about 30 years.

“It was exciting,” she said. “The last time I did that, I was about 8 years old and in my schoolyard.”

“Freaky” was the way Judi Bowers at Bear Mountain Ski Resort described Monday’s weather. “It was as if Mother Nature can’t make up her mind.”

The ski slopes had to be closed shortly before 3 p.m., about an hour early, because of the lightning danger. But today’s skiers may have an inch or two of fresh powder, reported Bowers, the public relations manager for the ski facility.

The storm tangled freeway traffic--which was light because of the holiday--but no major accidents or injuries were reported.

Police were kept busy, though, responding to burglar alarms triggered by hailstones pelting windows of homes and businesses.

In the Angeles National Forest, a rescue team had to carry an injured hiker out on a stretcher after the storm prevented a Los Angeles County Fire Department helicopter rescue team from airlifting the man. A department spokesman said the hiker had slipped and fallen on a trail deep in the forest, in an area just above La Canada that is not accessible by car or truck.