Lightning Wreaks Havoc as Monsoon Surprises Southland

A rare summer monsoon sneaked in through Southern California’s back door Thursday, pummeling inland valleys with unseasonable rain and lightning before moving west into Orange and Los Angeles counties and raising worries about flash floods in the mountains.

Lightning started fires, knocked out power and injured at least one man. Rain snarled traffic with fender-benders before the thunderstorm cells moved toward the sea, drenching eastern Los Angeles County and portions of Orange County.

Another line of thunderstorms is expected to push into the region today, but the skies are expected to clear this weekend, the National Weather Service said.

“We’re not talking about a disastrous event,” said Weather Service meteorologist Miguel Miller in San Diego. “But it is interesting.”

And problematic.

The Lake Mathews area, south of Riverside, received more than half an inch of rain, topping the total rainfall for all of July 2000 in half an hour.

More than 13,000 inland residents were without power for a while, including 4,000 in Fontana. Forecasters, fearful that lingering storms could swamp gulches in the San Gabriel Mountains, issued a flash-flood watch, but no extensive flooding was reported Thursday evening.

Police and fire officials scrambled to keep up.

“We weathered it,” said Mike Macias, a police detective in Ontario, where officials coped with a slew of minor accidents and blown transformers.

Though unusual in Southern California, the thunderstorms are common in the desert Southwest this time of year. Arizona, New Mexico and northern Mexico typically experience several muggy monsoons in the summer months, and periodically one of these storms sneaks west into California.

That’s what happened Thursday, Miller said, as a line of compact but fierce thunderstorms arrived about 10 a.m. in an arc that stretched from the Cajon Pass into Orange County. Those storms are known as monsoons--intense, regularly occurring, wind-fed summer storms that frequently hit certain parts of the world, such as northern Mexico and India, but occasionally stray into other areas.

In Orange County, the muggy weather brought a general funk to tourists, who had come to the coast expecting better weather.

“We were looking for the white sands and blue water. Is that here?” asked Sheila Carter, an Atascocita, Texas, visitor who was at the Newport Pier with her five children.

But Paul Atkinson, visiting from Baltimore, said he found the conditions refreshing after a 118-degree scorcher the day before in Las Vegas and the wilting humidity of Maryland before that.

“It’s nice to have a breeze,” he said.

Scattered showers were reported across Orange County, and firefighters were alerted to several lighting strikes, including one that ignited a 60-foot palm tree in San Clemente.

Sue McDanel, 62, said she heard a “big, loud crash” outside her Calle Juno home, ran outside and saw the tree on fire.

“My neighbors thought it was an explosion, a bomb or something. It was so loud you couldn’t believe it,” she said. The palm fronds were on fire, she said, and “I was running around barefoot and in pajamas.”

Onlookers helped control the flames with a garden hose until firefighters arrived. The fire did not spread.

The worst damage was in western stretches of the Inland Empire.

Just after 11 a.m. Thursday, lightning apparently struck an air-conditioning unit atop Encore Furniture Store on Holt Boulevard in Montclair.

Workers tried to put out the blaze but were quickly overwhelmed. Fire crews from seven agencies had the fire under control within two hours, and no one was injured.

In Rancho Cucamonga, 33-year-old Julio Resendis of San Bernardino was injured when lightning struck a nearby cement mixer. He had been pouring concrete for a new development north of Baseline, when he was thrown about five feet by the strike. He remained conscious. He was listed in good condition late Thursday at San Antonio Community Hospital in Upland.

Ventura County and the San Fernando Valley sidestepped most of the nasty weather--but sunshine didn’t seem to placate everyone there, either.

Times staff writers Erin Park, Matthew Chin, Douglas Haberman, Selicia Kennedy-Ross, Matt Surman, Andrea Perera, Matthew Ebnet and Gene Maddaus contributed to this report.