Rain’s Early Arrival Spares Food Share’s Charity Walk

When Marion Holzwarth awoke Saturday at 2:32 a.m., she stopped worrying.

The heavy rain had come and gone.

She went to bed the night before fearing the ninth annual Hike Against Hunger would be washed out. “I shook my husband and said, ‘The rain stopped,’ ” said Holzwarth, the volunteer walk coordinator. “Then I could go back to sleep.”

The event, put on by Food Share, drew 300 people to San Buenaventura State Beach on Saturday morning beneath clear skies and temperatures in the mid- to upper 50s.

“It’s always been beautiful for the walkers,” said Jim Mangin, executive director of the nonprofit food bank. “We’ve had other years like this one, when there’s storms on either side, but the clouds just open up and we’re given an opening.”

He said participant pledges amounted to about $30,000 for the Food Share cause.

Although the morning walkers had clear skies, about 40 hard-core enthusiasts, who were walking 30 miles to Santa Barbara, saw some droplets along their path Saturday afternoon.

The storm began about 9 p.m. Friday and lasted about five hours, dropping less than an inch of rain in most areas of the county, although Santa Paula reported 1.85 inches and Rose Valley in the Ventura Mountains got 2.5 inches.

“We got the amount we were expecting, it was just in a shorter time period,” said Mike Wofford, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

The county’s upper mountains received between 1 and 4 inches of snow.

“The L.A. County mountains had between 6 and 8 inches so it was the first real snow of the winter season,” Wofford said.

There were showers and cool temperatures Saturday afternoon, but the second storm front was not expected until about noon today, Wofford said. He said it would rain through the afternoon and evening, dropping about an inch or so, before tapering off around midnight.

“The main thing is the speed of the system,” Wofford said. “It could stall because the system downstream doesn’t move, just like a car in front of you not moving. If that happened we would get a lot more rain.”

Today’s storm will be part of a warm front, but most people won’t be able to tell the difference.

“It’s not going to be any warmer, there just won’t be snow in the mountains and warm systems hold a lot more moisture, so they can potentially be wetter,” he said.

Monday should be dry and cloudy, he said, but by Monday night a third storm should roll in and deposit another inch before moving on early Tuesday.

“The common theme here is the worst part of the storm is the middle of the night, then showers in the morning and dry during the day,” he said. “It’s just coincidence. No factors other than that.”

Showers are expected throughout the rest of the week.

Rex Laird with the Ventura County Farm Bureau said the rain didn’t cause any problems for farmers and he didn’t expect any in the next couple of days. “We are just starting to see runoff in the barrancas from the foothills and that’s it as far as I know,” he said.

In preparation for the storm, the Ventura County Fire Department had more staff than usual on hand to handle minor flooding or mudslides. They also had sandbags available for distribution but none was used. They received no weather related calls.

The California Highway Patrol reported 12 minor weather-related accidents from 9 p.m. Friday to 3 a.m. Saturday.