Gale-Force Windstorm Rips Through Region

Gale-force winds swept down mountain passes into Southern California on Monday, stirring up blinding clouds of dust in Palmdale and knocking out power to thousands of homes in the Antelope and San Fernando valleys.

The winds were generated by the combined forces of two vast weather systems over New Mexico and the Pacific Northwest.

Issuing advisories warning of “the potential for very strong and possibly damaging winds” through this morning, forecasters said it should stay breezy through Wednesday afternoon, not calming down entirely until sometime Thursday.

The winds hit the Antelope Valley shortly after dawn, felling power poles and bringing traffic to a halt in several neighborhoods.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department received scores of calls from blacked-out residents and from motorists confounded by inoperative traffic signals and swirling dust clouds that reduced visibility to a few feet in some areas.

One wind-tossed car veered off 50th Street and into an onion field. Others pulled off the road and waited out the dust flurries.

Sheriff’s deputies directed traffic, while Edison crews straightened utility poles blown down along Palmdale Boulevard.

“All of our available resources [were] dispatched to restore power in those areas as quickly as we could,” said Gil Alexander, a spokesman for Southern California Edison. “That includes borrowing from other areas.”

Streets in the San Fernando Valley were littered with trash, palm fronds and broken branches Monday afternoon, but no structural damage or injuries were reported.

About 2,000 homes temporarily lost power in Sherman Oaks, Woodland Hills and Lake View Terrace, according to Darlene Battle, a spokeswoman for the Department of Water and Power.

Earlier Monday morning, a gust estimated at 60 mph knocked over a 250-foot-tall construction crane on the Strip in Las Vegas, being used to erect a roller coaster at the Sahara Hotel. The crane crashed into a parking lot and an adjacent water sports park. No one was injured.

Stacey Johnstone, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., said the blasts came from winds circulating counter-clockwise around a powerful low-pressure system over New Mexico, reinforced by winds circulating clockwise around a large but less powerful high-pressure system over Washington and Idaho.

“These combined winds, funneling out of the north and northwest, are very strong at upper levels--close to 175 mph at 27,000 feet,” Johnstone said. “Lower down, at some points in the Southern California mountains, there were gusts of 64 mph Monday afternoon.”

Johnstone said the strongest winds, probably close to 70 mph, should hit Southern California’s mountain passes near dawn today.

“The winds will begin to taper off in the afternoon, with a few breezes continuing on Wednesday,” Johnstone said. “After that, things should die down and the weather should be pretty nice, with high temperatures in the coastal valleys in the 70s.”

Winds between 32 mph and 63 mph are rated as gale force under the commonly used Beaufort scale. Winds between 63 and 73 mph are storm force and those stronger than 73 mph are hurricane force. The scale is named for the British navigator who devised it in 1806.