Severe Weather Pattern Takes Toll

Tempestuous rain, lightning, hail, flash floods and even fire have bedeviled Southern California’s deserts and mountains almost every day for weeks in a capricious summer storm pattern.

The often brief but powerful storms hop about the region, sometimes with devastating effects.

A firefighter was killed Saturday when he was thrown from a firetruck that ran off a road during a rainstorm, and homes and businesses have been flooded.

But one man took time in his Yucca Valley neighborhood for some whitewater rafting on a city street.

The storms usually hit in the afternoon and have struck communities such as Beaumont, Mojave, Needles, Palm Springs and Victorville.

Ponderous thunderclouds towered above the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains again Sunday, signaling the volatile mix of heat and humidity stirring beyond.

There were no reports of further damage Sunday, and there were fewer storms. But for the last month, intense local storms have buried vehicles, snarled traffic on the interstates, washed out roads and felled power lines.

“It’s been a daily occurrence, more than normal, that’s for sure,” Bruce Rockwell, a meteorologist at the Oxnard station of the National Weather Service, said Sunday. “We get this every year, a monsoon event. What seems to be a little bit strange this year is the persistence. It’s usually two or three days and it breaks up.”

On Saturday, the storms turned deadly when a firetruck slid off Interstate 10 near Beaumont in heavy rain, killing one firefighter and injuring two others. The Riverside County Fire Department released a statement Sunday identifying the dead firefighter as Chris Kanton, 24.

The statement said the engine slid down a steep embankment, struck several trees and stopped on the roadway below. The agency gave no further details about the accident.

Firefighter Richard Bruning, who suffered minor injuries, was treated at a local hospital and released. Fire Apparatus Engineer Michael Arizaga remained hospitalized at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center with moderate injuries.

The strange weather results from an unusually strong high-pressure area over Arizona and New Mexico, combined with early Atlantic Ocean hurricanes such as Emily dumping moist air over the Gulf of California, said Bill Patzert, a climatologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge.

The humidity wheels around the high-pressure area clockwise from south to north, bringing moisture into Southern California.

“I think the extra ingredient here is the humidity,” Patzert said. “As it heats up in the afternoon, you get these spectacular, towering cumulus thunderheads. Sometimes there’s enough humidity and enough lift that you get fairly local and intense thunderstorms.”

Up to 2 inches of rain can fall in small areas. Unable to soak into the parched desert, it turns into what Patzert calls a gully-washer.

“You get a heavy rainfall for 20 minutes, or a half an hour or less,” he said. “All of a sudden, there it is washing over the local county road into the local mini-mall.”

Yucca Valley residents experienced something like that Thursday, when the area was hit by lightning and hail, closing several roads, flooding at least seven houses and causing power outages, said Capt. Rick Denison of the San Bernardino County Fire Department.

The lightning ignited two brush fires that were quickly extinguished by rain, he said.

Denison’s fire station has been giving out a few hundred sandbags each day to residents worried about more flooding.

But not all of the city’s residents have been on the defensive. When a July 24 storm dumped up to 10 inches of rain onto a sloping residential street, an unidentified man wearing only swim trunks seized the moment in an inflatable boat.

San Bernardino County Firefighter Amanda Hagerman and her partner, Firefighter Ed Neufeld, were closing off a road below Lucerne Vista to traffic when they saw the man, who they think was in his 20s, navigating Lucerne Vista in an inflatable raft.

Hagerman said the man jumped out before the end of the street, where a wash took the water toward a highway.

Neufeld told the man that he was in danger, “but he seemed oblivious to it,” Hagerman said. “He and his friends just thought it was something fun to do on a Sunday afternoon.”

Generally, storm damage has been limited to road closures and power outages.

Tom Boyd, a spokesman for Southern California Edison, said that in the last week he could recall at least two major outages because of lightning strikes and storm activity. “Midweek, the Palm Springs area got clobbered,” he said.

On Saturday, the San Jacinto area (including Perris) and Victorville “got hammered,” Boyd said.

High winds and lightning knocked down dozens of poles and damaged transformers and fuses, he said. Thousands of customers lost power in the outages.

There have been a number of close calls.

A private firetruck contracted to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management was inundated in a flash flood July 22 while responding to a fire near Essex, west of Needles, said Fred Simas of Brookstone Emergency Equipment & Services.

“They were responding to a lighting-caused fire,” he said. “The two engines left. This guy got caught in this wall of water. He made it out and got to higher ground.”

For many residents across the area, the storms have brought quick but potent reminders of nature’s ways.

Margaret Harris was behind the counter at the Bureau of Land Management visitor center in Jawbone Canyon, north of Mojave, when the canyon turned dark about 5 p.m. July 24.

“I can remember the winds howling through here,” she said. “The rain was coming in almost at a horizontal angle. You couldn’t see very far.”

When it was over, the wind had tossed straw bales across the yard and leveled the stop sign on nearby California Highway 14. “I was getting ready to close up,” Harris said. “I didn’t leave until after the storm had pretty much passed.”

And there may be more to come: The weather service forecasts continued hot weather and downpours in the mountains and desert through Wednesday.