Rain Hits O.C, but Don’t Blame You-Know-What

El Nino sat this one out.

The rainstorms that pelted Orange County throughout the day Thursday were just typical winter showers and weren’t related to the fabled weather phenomenon, forecasters said.

The showers brought with them fender benders and minor flooding--problems that paled in comparison with the mudslides, washouts and house evacuations seen Dec. 6. That day, the season’s first El Nino-related storm dumped as much as 8 inches of rain in Laguna Beach and Lake Forest and soaked other areas of the county with lesser amounts.

But Thursday, Laguna Beach received only 0.41 inches of rain, with 0.30 inches falling in Dana Point and amounts too small to measure in other Orange County cities, forecasters said.

“We were on alert,” Orange County Fire Authority spokeswoman Trish Sysak said. “We got a lot of sandbag calls. But nothing really major happened from it.”

On Thursday, a low-lying stretch of Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach, between Golden West Street and Warner Avenue, was closed for a few hours because of flooding.

During one 12-minute span Thursday afternoon, the California Highway Patrol received reports of 19 crashes on county freeways.

“We have quite a bit of water on the road,” said CHP Officer Bruce Mauldin. “That’s testing us pretty well.” But none of the rain-related crashes involved serious injuries, authorities said.

The Fire Authority received calls about a house flooding in Huntington Beach and four children swept down Carbon Creek through Cypress and Anaheim, but both were false alarms, Sysak said.

Meteorologist Wes Etheredge of WeatherData, which provides forecasts for The Times, said Thursday’s storm had nothing to do with El Nino and was brought on by an upper-level low-pressure system typical of the winter rainy season.

Etheredge compared the low-pressure system to an eddy that forms in a river. But the system is occurring in a river of air at 15,000 feet, where swirling currents create a ripple that draws moisture from the surface. If the low-pressure area collects enough moisture, storm clouds form and drop the moisture back on the ground in the form of rain, he said.

The storm that deluged the area two weeks ago collected extra moisture from the tropics, Etheredge said. But Thursday’s storm had no comparable outside source to strengthen it.