Season’s Wettest Storm Moves Through Area

The longest and wettest storm of the rainy season moved across the county Tuesday, keeping many people inside and prompting officials to warn against disease-carrying runoff at the beaches.

The county’s Environmental Health Division advised the public to avoid contact with all storm-water runoff and to stay out of the ocean for at least 72 hours after the storm’s end.

There is potential for disease-causing bacteria to be carried to the ocean in storm-water runoff.

Authorities blamed several minor traffic accidents on the wet weather, including a string of collisions on the Ronald Reagan Freeway that left two drivers with minor injuries. The return of sunshine in the afternoon may have contributed to an uneventful rush hour.

In Thousand Oaks, Sharon Halliday peered out the windows of the Barnes & Noble bookstore at a leaden sky and sipped her mug of tea.

“I’m so happy it’s raining,” she said, thumbing through the stack of magazines spread out before her. “It’s a perfect day for doing something exactly like this. . . . Relaxing and just being inside.”

Dolores Taylor, a hydrologist for the county flood-control district, said an area near the Ventura-Santa Barbara county border recorded the most rain--about 2 inches. Most areas received an inch or less, she said.

Before the storm, rainfall totals stood at about 40% of normal for this time of year and still have not reached a point where flooding and mudslides could occur. The rain season began Oct. 1.

“With the rain that we had today, it may take a jump to as high as 50 [percent of normal],” Taylor said.

The soft rain of this week’s storm was nothing compared with last year’s El Nino weather, she said.

“We had some intensities last year that made this look like a Sunday school picnic.”

Tuesday’s rain “was very gentle, never more than a quarter inch in an hour,” she said. “When the intensity stays pretty low, we don’t find we get a lot of flooding, a lot of mud or a lot of mess.”

The rain is expected to have cleared out by this morning, said National Weather Service meteorologist Jonathan Slemmer in Oxnard.

Skies will be partly cloudy today with breezes in the morning and highs in the middle to upper 50s.

Ventura County’s mountains could get scattered showers and winds gusting up to 30 mph early in the day, Slemmer said.

Sunny skies will return Thursday, and temperatures will warm to the low 60s.

No more rain is forecast for Ventura County through the weekend.

For farmers, moderate rain always is welcome. But this storm, which started Monday, helped indoors as well as outside. About 700 people attended a local hearing Monday to protest a plan to import Argentine lemons.