Whittier Man Dies in Crash on Freeway

A Whittier man was killed and seven other people injured Thursday on rain-slicked Ventura County roadways in a series of accidents that temporarily shut the southbound lanes of the Ventura Freeway, snarling traffic for hours, authorities said.

About a quarter to half an inch of rain dropped on most areas of the county, and the precipitation is expected to continue throughout the weekend, with a 40% chance of showers tonight and 60% chance of rain Saturday.

Upper Ojai, Santa Paula and the Matilija Dam areas received 1.5 to nearly 2 inches of rain Thursday.

Partly cloudy skies are forecast Sunday, and there is a chance of rain Monday.

A low-pressure weather pattern about 300 miles off the coast is sending showers to the Ventura County area, said Dennis Tussey, National Weather Service meteorologist.

California Highway Patrol officers responded to 32 vehicle accidents Thursday from 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Law enforcement wasn’t expecting the deluge, but extra staff will be on hand for the wet weekend, CHP Officer David Webb said.

The worst accident occurred about 10:30 a.m. on the Ventura Freeway near the Main Street exit in Ventura when a 1997 Ford Explorer traveling north crossed the dirt median and struck a southbound Explorer.

Driver John Clayton Rahder, 60, was killed and his 49-year-old wife, Helen, suffered minor injuries when their vehicle flipped over and skidded into the freeway’s southbound lanes.

The cause of the accident is unclear, and the couple were wearing their seat belts, Webb said.

The overturned vehicle was struck by a 1998 Explorer driven by Lorraine Berg, 48, of San Luis Obispo. Berg was taken to a local hospital for treatment of minor injuries and released.

Suitcases, cereal boxes and canned goods were strewn across the roadway after the accident, which closed the southbound lanes for about two hours.

Nearly five hours earlier, traffic on the freeway’s southbound lanes was backed up for more than an hour in Camarillo after a tractor-trailer collided with two cars near Las Posas Road.

And early Thursday, a vehicle carrying workers from the Technicolor Video Services plant in Camarillo skidded on mud-covered Pleasant Valley Road east of Las Posas and landed upside down in a ditch, injuring five of the six people in the vehicle.

“It appears that no one was wearing seat belts,” Ventura County Sheriff’s Senior Deputy John Popp said.

The workers, all Oxnard residents, were late-shift employees on their way home about 12:30 a.m., Popp said.

The driver of the older model Chevy Suburban, 66-year-old Guillermo Medellin, suffered minor injuries, while passenger Armando Zavala, 20, suffered a fractured breast bone.

Three women passengers suffered major head injuries. Maria Melgoza, 48; Estella Franco, 35, and Adela Guitterrez, 54, were hospitalized. Late Thursday afternoon, Melgoza was in stable condition at Los Robles Regional Medical Center, and Guitterrez was in critical condition at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard. St. John’s Pleasant Valley Hospital officials wouldn’t release Franco’s condition.

As motorists stopped to help the workers, nine cars hit one another, causing five additional accidents near the intersection, Popp said. No one was seriously injured in those crashes, but the road was closed until 6 a.m. while crews worked to clear the wreckage.

The amount of rain that fell Thursday was a nuisance to workers harvesting strawberries and did little to saturate the citrus and avocado crops that need it most, said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau, a nonprofit agricultural lobbying group.

“You have to take these storms in the context in which they occur,” he said. “We’ve had so little rainfall, it would take several storms of this magnitude before you’d see any saturation.”

County environmental health officials said Thursday’s storm brought enough rain to flush animal waste and other contaminants into streams that drain into the ocean.

Residents should stay out of local ocean waters and not eat shellfish from Ventura County for the next 72 hours to avoid infections, warned Robert Gallagher, manager of the Environmental Health Division’s technical services section.

The storm did, however, help nudge Ventura County closer to its seasonal rainfall average, said Robin Jester, flood control engineer.

“It certainly did help get water to start soaking in,” she said. “Maybe after this series of storms, we may end up looking at 35% to 40% of normal” rainfall for this time of year.

Times Community News reporter Tony Lystra contributed to this story.

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County Rainfall

Here are rainfall figures from the Ventura County Flood Control Department for the 24-hour period ending at p.m. Thursday . Oct. 1 is the beginning of the official rain year.

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Rainfall Rainfall Normal rainfall Location last 24 hours since Oct. 1 to date Camarillo 0.28 2.45 8.11 Casitas Dam 1.22 4.02 14.12 Casitas Rec. Center 1.54 4.93 14.09 Fillmore 0.67 2.51 11.44 Matilija Dam 1.85 4.64 15.97 Moorpark 0.35 2.44 8.80 Ojai 1.01 3.17 12.66 Upper Ojai 1.85 4.56 13.65 Oxnard 0.35 1.93 8.69 Piru 0.31 1.77 10.27 Port Hueneme 0.35 3.51 8.54 Santa Paula 1.65 5.82 10.62 Simi Valley 0.28 1.82 8.46 Thousand Oaks 0.16 1.36 9.13 Ventura Govt. Center 0.55 3.03 9.61

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