Linda Leaves Just a Dash of Rain

Hurricane Linda, which was expected to wreak havoc along the Southern California coastline this week, has left Ventura County with a whimper.

The remaining vestiges of the hurricane amounted to sporadic bursts of rain Wednesday night and Thursday morning mainly over the eastern portion of the county.

The National Weather Service in Oxnard reported just slightly over a tenth of an inch of rain in Simi Valley and less than a tenth of an inch in Thousand Oaks. Other cities, such as Ventura, experienced slight drizzle from the hurricane that was downgraded to a tropical storm earlier this week.

“There was a little bit,” said Simi Valley resident Karen Smith, who stopped by Township Elementary School on Thursday morning. “It was a few sprinkles, and some of the kids had the umbrellas out. It was just enough to get the ground wet.”

The amounts of rain were too small for Ventura County Flood Control to record.

“In order to officially call it a trace, we have to get the rain stick wet,” said Dolores Taylor, the agency’s senior hydrologist. “It can’t just have one drop of water on the whole thing.”

The weather service meteorologists said a moisture front is moving from the southwest to the northeast.

County residents can expect clear skies today, according to meteorologists. Then cloudy skies will hang high over the area this weekend, with temperatures warming Sunday to the mid- to upper 80s in the east county and low to mid-70s along the coasts in Ventura and Oxnard.

In the meantime, flood control workers are clearing parts of the county’s 155 miles of open channels and 33 miles of underground channels.

Removing weeds, water plants and other garbage--such as abandoned supermarket carts and sofas--should clear the drains so they can accommodate this winter’s storms, which are expected to be especially harsh because of El Nino weather conditions.

“If we get a real frog strangler, where it’s raining so hard that even frogs drown, most places we’ll [be able to] handle it,” Taylor said.