For Southland, El Nino Is a Dark Cloud Overhead

When Lois Fox bought her ocean-view home last year, the skies were clear, the sea was glistening blue and the waves rolled in with a gentle timelessness.

Enter El Nino, the weather world’s version of a brat throwing a tantrum. Blue skies go gray. Rain falls so heavily it echoes. The once-seductive waves seem to snarl.

And Fox keeps looking at her ceiling.

“It’s a 17-year-old house, and I’m sitting here constantly looking up to see if anything’s coming through,” Fox said. “I’ve fared pretty well. There’s a small roof leak in my garage. I’ve been home all day while [the storm] is going on, and there are tree limbs falling all over the place.”

So much for peaceful ocean-side living.

This is the part jealous friends and relatives back East don’t think about when they’re shivering in sleet. Fifty degrees and rain isn’t a blizzard, but it’s not exactly pleasant, either. Sure, the rain makes the brown hills of summer sprout with green fuzz, a landscape of massive Chia pets. But when El Nino keeps pushing storms ashore in waves, that peaceful easy feeling the Eagles used to sing about gives way to stress.

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Sometimes it turns tragic. Los Angeles police reported Friday that a man was viciously attacked in MacArthur Park during Tuesday’s rains when his umbrella accidentally brushed another man’s. The second man stabbed the first in the eye with the end of his own umbrella, driving the tip into the brain and leaving the unidentified victim unconscious and hospitalized in critical condition.

“Somebody coined the phrase ‘rain rage,’ and I think that’s what it was,” said Vito Cicoria, supervisor of homicide detectives at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart station. “Some weather conditions are so negative for people that it sets them off like road rage. This guy probably has an unstable personality and anything will set him off.”

Unstable ground is setting Leslie Paskus off. She can’t shake the feeling that the hill behind her Silverado Canyon house might decide to move in with her.

Paskus and her husband, Ed Amador, bought their home on This-A-Way three years ago. They didn’t know that their son’s bedroom would flood after every heavy rainstorm. Or that they were tucked under a steep, shaky slope that could shed mud and boulders when the ground is soaked.

When the first drops of rain fall, Paskus’ first thought is an unprintable expletive. Friday afternoon, as the rains hit, she raced back from running errands in Tustin praying she’d get there in time to pack up the dog and get out of the canyon until the storms subsided. Last night, she planned to sleep with suitcases packed in case they had to make a middle of the night escape.

Still, she tries to take it in stride.

“I realize in order to live in paradise there’s a price to pay,” she said. “We didn’t know it would be quite this high a price, but it’s still worth it. El Nino? It’s here and you deal with it. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else.”

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At UCI’s Early Childhood Education Center, the stress is more physical than psychological. With 88 youngsters in the day care center, a string of rainy days has them bouncing off the walls.

“It’s pretty noisy,” said director Alison Hall of Laguna Hills. “After a few days of rain, the noise levels in the classrooms tend to elevate. Three or four children can seem like 10 children, and 20 can seem like 50.”

For Dave Jordan of Sunset Beach, El Nino stress is more economic. He grew up near the ocean and has been surfing since he was a youngster. El Nino means big waves. But it also means lost work--Jordan is a plasterer, and rain makes it impossible to work on the outside of buildings.

So he goes to Seal Beach to watch the ocean.

“I’ve been here every day” of the recent rains, he said Friday afternoon as warm shafts of sun broke through thick gray clouds. Steady winds filled the air with salt spray. Overhead, a pelican struggled to make headway, and up the coast a fresh storm enveloped the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

“In January and February, we usually get swells like this anyway,” Jordan said as his son and daughter beachcombed. “This is sweet. The waves--keep ‘em coming.”

A block away, Mike Spratt talked of the acceptance that comes with living near the ocean, El Nino or not. He has lived in Seal Beach for nearly 20 years, and during the 1982-83 El Nino watched water flow through his front door and out the back door.

The key is planning, he said. Have alternative places to spend the night in case it gets bad. Figure out who you’re going to give your thawed meat to when the power goes and the freezer won’t run.

Then hope the berms hold as you wait for the calendar to flip by.

“January is always the toughest month,” said Spratt, a Boeing defense contract manager. “I’m glad we got by January. This is the first time February has been a month of concern. Then usually we’re fine until April. In April, you get your last storm. You get God’s last kiss.”

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But isn’t that stressful, all that waiting for disaster to pass when you can hear the waves booming on the other side of the temporary sand mountain?

“Stress? No,” Spratt said. “I don’t think we’re stressed. A person who’s spending their first winter, they might feel stressed. I’m sure they’re thinking about their furniture.

“I just transferred to a new job. That’s where the stress is.”

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Times wire services contributed to this report.