Winds Rip Southland for 2nd Straight Day

It was not a good day to haul your Christmas tree home from the lot.

Strong Santa Ana winds powered through Southern California on Thursday for the second straight day, toppling trees, bashing boats, triggering burglar alarms and threatening to strip the pine needles off any tree unfortunate enough to be tied atop a car roof.

Sustained winds clocked at 25 to 50 mph knocked down some power lines and toyed with others, setting lights flickering across Southern California and causing prolonged outages in several Inland Empire and Orange County communities. More than 226,000 Southern California Edison customers were affected.

In the Santa Catalina Island harbor town of Avalon, predawn winds ripped 18 boats from their moorings and the 6-foot surf knocked a Harbor Patrol officer out of his rescue vessel. He was not injured, but in Ventura County, the winds did send one man to the hospital. A pine tree five stories tall crashed onto a pickup truck in Thousand Oaks, destroying it. The driver, who was delivering a Christmas tree, suffered a fractured arm.

In Orange County, meanwhile, the blustery currents ripped the roofs off two mobile homes in Santa Ana. ‘We’ve been saving for Christmas,” said one of the victims, 28-year-old Margarita Clark, “but it looks like we may spend all our money on this.”

The winds also sucked awnings off storefronts along Pacific Coast Highway and sent so much debris tumbling across roads that the San Diego Freeway was all but shut down during the morning commute.

Lifeguards in Huntington Beach stuck it out through the day, but it wasn’t easy: “Our flags are ripped to shreds and most of our trash cans are swimming right now,” lifeguard Lt. Mike Beuerlein reported.

For all their destructive force, the Santa Anas did bring one holiday gift: stunning, smog-free views.

“It’s beautiful out here if you like wind--and if you have rocks in your pocket so you don’t get blown clear down to San Diego,” said David Dowling, an emergency communications supervisor stationed in Rialto.

Gusts of up to 70 mph rattled Dowling’s buildings a few times an hour throughout the morning. “I can definitely feel the windows shake,” he said. “It just rocks and rolls out here.”

And he wasn’t even getting the worst of it. One furious blast swept through Fremont Canyon in the Santa Ana Mountains at hurricane strength of 80 mph.

The Santa Anas, which were fueled by a high-pressure system in northern Nevada and Utah, should settle down today and continue to weaken Saturday, forecaster Wes Etheredge of WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts to The Times, said.

Though Santa Ana winds are best-known for spreading fires in the hot, dry summer and fall, Etheredge said it’s actually quite common for them to blow in winter as well. “In this part of the world,” he said, “it’s not really off the wall.”

That, of course, was of little comfort to the Edison power crews called on to climb swaying poles--usually without safety lines--to fiddle with blown-out hardware. “People don’t appreciate how hard this is, in my opinion,” grumbled Edison spokesman Tom Boyd.

Crews were having particular difficulty restoring power to thousands of customers left in the dark in the Inland Empire and parts of Orange County, Boyd said.

Hundreds of homes in Rancho Cucamonga went dark at 3 a.m. when a tree toppled, bringing four power poles down with it. They still had not been “energized” by late Thursday afternoon, Boyd said. Other hours-long outages were reported in parts of Ontario, Fullerton, Huntington Beach and Santa Ana.

Even when the Santa Anas began to mellow Thursday evening, Edison crews remained on alert. “All it takes,” Boyd said, “is a piece of garbage thrown up [on a power line] by the wind and there you go again, another outage.”

If Edison crews were feeling harried, so too were other folks in charge of emergency responses.

In Ventura County, for example, law enforcement agencies reported that devilish gusts set off three times the usual number of false burglar alarms.

And the county’s California Highway Patrol officers kept hopping to answer phantom alerts from freeway call boxes blown open by the wind. Thousand Oaks officials, meanwhile, had to plan a major cleanup: The wind knocked down at least 25 trees.

Other damage included six vehicles banged up in Lake Forest when a tree fell into an apartment complex carport, and a hole burned into a Huntington Beach parking lot when a 12,000-volt power line crashed to the ground.

Then there was Jean Boyd’s home in Corona del Mar. Boyd was about to leave for a hairdresser appointment when she heard a crack and saw a 70-foot eucalyptus tree fall on her roof, ripping off the side gutters. She considers herself lucky to have gotten off with that.

“I just think,” she said, “there was an angel watching over my shoulder.”

Times staff writers Scott Martelle, Tini Tran, George Ramos and David Reyes and correspondents Lisa Fernandez, Veronique de Turenne and Hope Hamashige contributed to this story.

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Source of the Santa Anas

Santa Ana winds generated by a high-pressure system over the Great Basin move through the mountains from the north-northeast, funneling through the canyons into Southern California. A ridge of high pressure southwest of Point Conception added intensity to this week’s wind gusts.

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Where the Name Comes From

There are many theories as to why the winds are called Santa Anas. Some believe the name comes from Satanas, Spanish for Satan. But most likely they are named for Santa Ana Canyon, the narrow gap in the Santa Ana Mountains in Orange and Riverside counties, where the winds are especially strong.

Sources: National Weather Service, UCLA Atmospheric Science Dept., Encyclopedia Americana, Weather of Southern California