Storm, Accidents Hit Southland

Weather forecasters awoke Tuesday to a surprise: rain and snow blanketing a parched Southland a day earlier than they had predicted.

The skies opened at 2 a.m., snarling traffic and delivering 0.81 of an inch of rain to downtown Los Angeles by evening. It was the first significant rainfall since Dec. 28 and suggested there still may be hope for the El Nino weather pattern that was supposed to soak the area this winter.

More of the same is expected today. Forecasters with the National Weather Service are predicting 2 to 3 inches of rain. The storm, which could be the largest of the rainy season, is the first to be generated by the long-awaited onset of El Nino.

“It’s not over yet,” beamed Conrad C. Lautenbacher Jr., administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, at a meeting of the American Meteorological Society in Long Beach. “El Nino is still with us.”

One of the worst accidents, a four-car crash on the Sepulveda Pass near Mulholland Drive during evening rush hour, injured four drivers, three of them critically, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department. All the injured were expected to survive, authorities said.

Earlier, a jackknifed big rig blocked the transition from the eastbound 101 to the southbound 405 for 3 1/2 hours and spilled 100 gallons of diesel fuel.

On the 134 Freeway in Glendale, three separate accidents involving 14 cars blocked lunchtime traffic. An accident involving three cars and a truck stopped traffic on southbound Interstate 5 in Santa Clarita for two hours in midmorning.

In Orange County, 151 accidents were reported, two of them fatal. A 50-year-old man died when his SUV slammed into a light pole in San Juan Capistrano, and a 72-year-old man was killed when his car hit a center divider on Pacific Coast Highway and then struck an oncoming car.

Snowfall closed a 40-mile stretch of Interstate 5 in the mountains of northern Los Angeles County for six hours Tuesday morning. The road was open for the evening commute.

Winds whipped up by the storm reached 72 mph in Ventura County and contributed to power outages throughout the Southland.

About 38,000 customers of Southern California Edison lost electricity during the night, according to company spokesman Marlon Walker, who said that most outages were in the San Gabriel Valley.

By 8 p.m. Tuesday, about 1,300 customers still had no power, mostly in the Inland Empire.

Forecasters originally had called for rain to begin falling Tuesday night, believing that warm and dry winds blowing from the northeast would hold off a low-pressure storm system parked offshore. They were wrong.

For the national weather forecasters convening in Long Beach, the rain came just in time to support their sometimes-criticized forecast for the warm and wet winter associated with El Nino conditions.

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Times staff writers Steve Chawkins, David Haldane, Massie Ritsch and Mai Tran contributed to this report.