O.C. Storm Gives Them Plenty to Talk About

It was a dark and stormy morning (and early afternoon). A strange sound -- thunder? -- punctuated the silence. Then, pellets of liquid -- rain? -- began falling from the sky. No one knew what to do, until they realized their sunroofs were open.

Toto, I don’t think we’re in the O.C. anymore.

Out here, thunder and rain in September are enough to motivate us to tweak our living wills and make sure the house is stocked with enough canned goods to withstand whatever apocalypse is coming.

As strange as it is for most people in the country to grasp, this just doesn’t happen here. At least, not until November. People in other parts of the country can discuss the weather whenever they want to; we Southern Californians can’t. For long stretches at a time, we’re deprived of meaningful troughs or fronts or low-pressure systems. We wouldn’t know an isobar if we ran into one. In my 18 years at the paper, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I heard thunder while at the office.

But I heard it this morning.

Hey, that’s nothing. You want to talk weather? Listen to this one from Lily Eichert, a 25-year-old Orange County native who also laments that she never gets to tell weather stories. Until today, that is. Terrifying, mind you, terrifying (OK, that’s my word, not hers).

She and her husband, Brian, were up most of the night Monday in their Fullerton home because their dog hates lightning and was running amok indoors. Around 7:15 Tuesday morning, they saw and heard a bluish white flash of light and a crack of lightning. “It made the whole house shudder,” Lily says, clearly warming to the tale.

It was another hour or so until they were up and about and took inventory: The TV satellite was out, the computer was down, their surge protector wasn’t functioning, the garage door opener was kaput.

And what was that? Debris under the big pine tree in the yard? They went to their 26-foot RV that they’d plugged into the garage overnight in preparation for a weekend trip.

The extension cord running from the RV to the garage looked like it had “exploded outward,” Lily says. The wires inside the outer coating were bent beyond a human’s ability to do. The screws attached to the metal panel outside the RV had blown off. The metal was bent. Inside the trailer, a fluorescent-light panel had blown off. The bulbs were shattered and scattered.

“It did some amazing things,” Lily says of the lightning strike. They traced the current’s path from the pine tree to an antenna on top of the trailer, through the trailer, through the extension cord into the garage, into the house, and then out and up a power pole.

I asked if that were possible. Lily says she thinks so. I don’t care if it is, because it’s a great weather story.

Everybody on the block was talking about it well into Tuesday afternoon, Lily says. And when the UPS deliveryman showed up, they talked to him about it, too. Just like almost every day in the Midwest, talking about the weather had brought the neighbors together.

“You don’t see this in California,” Lily says. “When people in other places say, ‘What kind of weather do you have?’ we say we don’t have any.

“Every time there’s a trickle of rain, you have Storm Watch 2005 [on TV].”

Lily is well aware that, compared to Hurricane Katrina, we shouldn’t even be calling this a weather story. But, like me, she’s seen Midwestern summer storms and remembers what impressive shows they are.

She sort of misses them. Me too.

Once you’re immersed in the Southern California culture, you forget how communal it feels to discuss a storm’s combination of beauty, power and destruction.

I thanked Lily for telling the story and began typing it up. That was an hour or so ago.

It’s now 4 o’clock on Tuesday afternoon. The sun just came out.

Fun’s over.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.