Southland Gets a Taste of Wild N. Calif. Storm

A savage storm cast hundreds of thousands of homes into darkness in Northern California on Monday and then barreled south, snarling traffic on flooded streets, closing the Santa Ana Freeway in Los Angeles and triggering a crash that killed two people in Riverside.

More is on the way. Two ominous Pacific Ocean storms are expected to wallop the state from one end to the other on Thursday, continuing a battery of systems that are supposed to last through Jan. 1.

“It’s one of the wettest patterns we’ve seen in several years. And we’re not out of it yet,” said Bob Benjamin, a forecaster for the National Weather Service.

Nearly 2 inches of rain fell in Los Angeles from 2 to 4 p.m., a record for the day in downtown.

But hardest hit was Northern California, where since late Thursday a series of punishing weather systems has swept through the region with torrential rains and wind gusts that topped 100 mph.

The storms were blamed for the weekend death of a driver in Calaveras County when a tree toppled into his vehicle, and of a man in Stanislaus County who was electrocuted when he was struck by a broken power line. On Sunday, a snowboarder trapped in a storm-related avalanche near Lake Tahoe was found and pronounced dead.

More than 330,000 Pacific Gas & Electric Co. customers from Eureka to Bakersfield were without power, and numerous schools were closed. Flood warnings were issued for both the Napa and Russian rivers, and waves of 25 feet pounded North Coast beaches.

In Southern California’s high desert, winds toppled four transmission towers and more than two dozen power poles about 10:45 a.m., leaving 16,000 Southern California Edison customers without electricity in parts of Lancaster, Palmdale, Acton and Quartz Hill. About 2,200 customers were still without power late Monday.

The storm was blamed for more than 160 accidents in Los Angeles County, the CHP said, and at least 80 in the Inland Empire. Those included a 4:21 p.m. crash on the Pomona Freeway in Riverside when a pickup truck veered across four lanes, struck a tour bus in the carpool lane, then veered out of control and struck a car. The drivers of the car and the truck died on impact, and 26 people in the tour bus were injured, CHP Officer Jim Whitney said. Two lanes of the westbound Riverside Freeway remained closed at 11 p.m.

The afternoon downpour also flooded the Santa Ana Freeway, which was shut down in both directions in Commerce from 4 to 6 p.m., backing up traffic for miles.

“There was too much rain in a short period of time with a lot of concrete. The rain’s got to go somewhere,” said Bruce Rockwell, a forecaster with the National Weather Service.

The storm also brought down high-voltage power lines in North Hollywood, forcing the evacuation of scores of homes and businesses along Vineland Avenue.

Firefighters arriving at 2:45 p.m. found wires arcing and transformers exploding. The 34,500-volt lines on the ground posed an “extreme danger” of electrocution and prompted the precautionary evacuations, although no one was injured, said Jim Wells of the Los Angeles Fire Department.

Just before dusk, reports that someone had fallen into the rain-swollen Los Angeles River sent swift-water rescue teams into position. Aided by helicopters equipped with heat-detecting cameras, rescue crews scoured a 10-mile stretch of the river from Sherman Oaks to Glendale, but they called off the search when they found no sign of anyone in the water.

In Malibu, a chunk of boulder fell on Malibu Canyon Road, closing it in both directions from 3 to 6 p.m. In Glendora, Big Dalton Canyon in Glendora was closed due to gushing mud. The Fire Department has offered sandbags to canyon residents there in preparation for more storms. And on Melrose Avenue in West Los Angeles, shopkeepers and restaurant owners used plastic buckets and sandbags to stave off water that surged through their entrances.

Fierce winds also prompted authorities to close a section of the Golden State Freeway on both sides of the Grapevine in the Tehachapi Mountains.

The wind caused a military satellite launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County to be postponed for at least a day, officials said.

Much of Santa Barbara’s downtown tourist section also was smacked by the storm.

“Downtown Santa Barbara took a fair hit, with water going into some businesses and some streets becoming virtually impassable,” county fire Capt. Charlie Johnson said. Fortunately, he said, the water receded almost as quickly as it came in.

In Orange County, the rain caused the roof of an auto-parts store in La Habra to collapse. There were no injuries. But the bigger problem was storm-driven waves.

Seal Beach officials warned residents that despite the recent reinforcement of the sand berm protecting oceanfront property, sandbags might be needed to hold back the sea. Breakers were in the 8- to 10-foot range Monday, and were expected to increase several more feet today when a 6-foot high tide is expected at 7:09 a.m., Seal Beach officials said.

For state water officials, the precipitation is good news. “We’d like as much rain and snowpack as we can get, but of course not all at once, because no one wants flooding,” said Gary Bardini, chief forecaster for the California Department of Water Resources.

To date, the Northern Sierra Precipitation Index, which measures snow and rain in key watersheds, is 125% above average. And the more water that collects in the mountains now, the less likely the state will suffer drought conditions next summer. “It’s certainly good to be ahead of the average,” Bardini said, “but we’ve still got a lot of year left.”

As of Monday morning, the storms had dropped nearly a foot of rain on San Rafael in Marin County; 6.2 inches in downtown Oakland; and 5.8 inches in San Francisco, which set an 85-year record Friday for most rainfall for the date, 2.9 inches.

One 25-year-old Northern California woman was given a fright as a 50-foot oak tree crashed through her bedroom roof over the weekend, missing her by only a few feet. But a San Francisco man wasn’t so lucky: His leg was broken when he was struck by a section of scaffolding loosened by a gust of wind struck him.

In Sonoma County, where 30,000 homes remained without power Monday, low-lying vineyards were turned into massive lakes with only the tops of grape trellises showing, and many intersections were without working traffic lights.

At J’s Amusement Park near Santa Rosa, which is closed for the season, the scene was equally surreal. The blue water slides were half submerged by a flood of muddy water from a nearby creek.

Still, residents remained upbeat.

At a Safeway store in Guerneville, a small, wooded resort town along the Russian River in Sonoma County, a generator provided power for cash registers and a handful of florescent lights. But managers used yellow tape to cordon off the frozen food aisle like a crime scene, moving all frozen and refrigerated foods to trucks parked behind the store.

It was much the same at the Guerneville post office, where Postmaster Greg Pace has greeted customers wearing a miner’s lamp for light since the power went off Saturday.

“This is like going back 25 years,” he said. “Back in the early 1980s, all the post offices were hooked up to a central satellite transaction system. But with the power off, we are now back to licking stamps and weighing mail on these old scales we had stored away in a closet.”

At Kragen Auto Parts in nearby Sebastopol, customers were allowed into the darkened store one by one, served by three employees -- one who took orders, another who fetched products from the shelves and a third who wrote out receipts by hand, cash only.

While most Guerneville businesses remained closed, Angelo Dieli opened his River Inn as usual -- with a few storm-related changes: Locals sat in booths lighted by kerosene lamps while Dieli prepared breakfast over propane stoves in the kitchen.

“For us, business actually picks up at times like this,” Dieli said. “No one has power at home and they can’t get to work, so they come here.”

At the Green House restaurant in Sebastopol, owner Ray Kinley had the same idea. Even though power remained out into Monday, the kitchen was open and diners were asked to sit near the windows and not in the darkened back room.

“I’m a die-hard cook,” Kinley explained. “You know how to do this stuff in your sleep, so I can do it without lights.”

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Times staff writers Louis Sahagun, Daniel Hernandez, Carol Chambers, David Reyes, Hector Becerra and Karima A. Haynes contributed to this report.