Driving Us Mad

No, I wasn’t stuck behind a mudslide. I didn’t pass by a single flooded house. I didn’t notice any drivers waving for help from atop half-submerged cars. I didn’t witness any wrecks--not even a fender-bender.

So why--from start to finish--was Wednesday’s morning commute such a disaster?

The answer, of course, is that when it rains, even a little, on Los Angeles motorists, frustrations pour.

Things started falling apart on me in the driveway. I poured hot coffee down my leg as I tried to hold my raincoat over my head, balance the coffee cup and unlock the car at the same time.

They finished falling apart in the company parking structure. That’s where I climbed out of my car and got doused with oily rainwater leaking from an upper level.

In between were two hours and 25 miles of misery.

On really good mornings, say Sundays about 7 a.m., the trip from Woodland Hills to downtown takes about 20 minutes. Most weekdays it’s a 45-minute deal.

I could see even before I pulled onto the Ventura Freeway that Wednesday’s would be an ordeal.

Downtown-bound freeway traffic was stopped. Cars on Ventura Boulevard, which parallels the freeway through the San Fernando Valley, seemed to be moving, though. So I decided to take surface streets to town.

Big mistake. Freeway motorists could see the boulevard, too. And they were cascading from its offramps onto the boulevard like rain runoff coming down a storm drain.

By the time I reached Tarzana, the boulevard had slowed to a crawl. By Encino, traffic was stopped.

When I decided I’d better call the office to say I would be late, it took 15 minutes to creep three blocks until I found a pay phone.

I was desperate now to get off the boulevard. But would the freeway be any faster?

I didn’t have a clear view of the freeway, so I switched off Howard Stern and tuned in KNX (or was it KFWB?) for a traffic report. No luck: They were giving an update on a Laguna Niguel landslide that happened last week--complete with the sound of last week’s cracking wood.

It took 20 minutes to inch up the White Oak Avenue onramp and squeeze into the barely moving freeway flow. KFWB (or was it KNX?) was mentioning mudslides that closed Pacific Coast Highway as I squeezed my small car in behind a Jaguar with the word “Malibu” on its license plate frame.

Traffic flow picked up briefly through Sherman Oaks as the Malibu mud refugees peeled off and headed south on the San Diego Freeway. By Studio City, the rain was off-and-on and the traffic was stop-and-go.

Past the Hollywood-Ventura split, the Hollywood Freeway moved at a snail’s pace through the Cahuenga Pass and on toward downtown.

“You just getting in?” was the greeting after 11 a.m. when I got to work--my hair wet from the parking structure, not the rain. But by then my co-workers were spinning commuter war stories of their own.

Abigail Goldman related that the only thing moving along Laurel Canyon Boulevard in the Hollywood Hills was rain runoff cascading down the street. Eric Lichtblau told of a series of crashes that snarled his trip up the Long Beach Freeway from Long Beach.

Ann O’Neill said she traveled an hour on the Ventura Freeway before getting a flat tire and then getting soaked by rain. Hector Tobar told how his 4.3-mile drive from Mt. Washington took 40 minutes instead of its usual 15.

Matea Gold described flooding along 3rd Street that gave motorists coming in from the Fairfax district a series of unwelcome drenchings. Julie Marquis said it took two hours and 14 minutes to travel downtown from Claremont on the San Bernardino Freeway. John Hernandez spent two hours traveling from San Dimas on the same freeway.

Susan Denley explained how only the carpool lane saved her from a bumper-to-bumper jam on the San Gabriel River Freeway in from Orange County. Ken Reich revealed how a radio traffic report saved him in North Hollywood by announcing that Burbank Boulevard was jammed. He figured that report would scare other motorists away and he was right: The boulevard was virtually empty when he got there.

Bettina Boxall had the most sobering story. She managed to get to work on time Wednesday and spent the morning monitoring police and other agencies for storm problems.

By mid-afternoon the California Highway Patrol had counted more than 450 traffic accidents, double the number on a typical dry day, she said. One of them, a truck-car crash on the Pomona Freeway in Hacienda Heights, proved fatal.

Several big-rig accidents closed lanes on different sections of the Golden State Freeway. In one of them, a northbound truck toppled at the Pasadena Freeway interchange at 4 a.m., threatening to crash onto the lanes below. Only the driver’s seat belt kept him from plummeting 30 feet.

A 54-minute power outage shut down the Blue Line on Wednesday morning, forcing passengers to switch to MTA buses at stations including Vernon, Florence and Slauson.

In Eagle Rock, 800,000 gallons of raw sewage spilled into the Los Angeles River and headed for Long Beach, closing beaches. An additional 600,000 gallons of sewage overflowed at 42nd Street and Kansas Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles and made its way to the Santa Monica Bay, closing beaches from Venice to Imperial Highway.

Wednesday’s slow-moving storm dumped well over an inch of rain throughout the Los Angeles Basin, with some areas hit by much more. UCLA, for example, was soaked by 3.95 inches.

But meteorologist John Sherwin of WeatherData Inc. told Boxall that we’ll have a chance to dry out today and Friday before another, weaker storm system arrives with showers Saturday. Sunday should be cloudy and cool.

Although El Nino has helped push rainfall totals at the Los Angeles Civic Center about 10 inches above the seasonal norm to date, Sherwin said he did not think Wednesday’s storm was an El Nino offspring.

I feel better already.

*

Times correspondent Deborah Belgum contributed to this story.