Powerful Storm Batters Region, Triggers Slides

A blustery arctic storm hammered Southern California with intense thundershowers Thursday night, unleashing mudslides below the fire-scarred hillsides of Malibu and triggering an all-night vigil by emergency workers in Laguna Beach.

Heavy snow fell in the mountains, stranding several dozen motorists on the Angeles Forest Highway and closing Interstate 5 in the Grapevine area. A scramble was on for the last available motel rooms in Gorman as it became increasingly likely that the state’s principal north-south highway would remain closed until sometime this morning.

The Thursday night commute was a stop-and-go nightmare on most local freeways, which were clogged with traffic accidents and stalled cars. Despite heavy rains, roads through the Sepulveda flood basin remained open.

An unidentified man, believed to be in his early 40s, was killed about 5:15 p.m. when his car spun out on rain-slicked La Tuna Canyon Road about a mile west of the Foothill Freeway, crossed the center line and triggered a four-car crash, city fire officials said. They said two other men and a woman--drivers of the other cars involved--suffered minor injuries.

The California Highway Patrol blamed the rain for a number of traffic accidents in Orange County, most of them minor. The CHP said one of those accidents briefly blocked all lanes of the Orange Freeway at Katella Avenue.

Firefighters were on alert in fire-ravaged Laguna Beach, where the storm was expected to persist until 4 a.m., with winds gusting up to 40 m.p.h.

“This is billed as the strongest storm since the fire,” said Patrick Brennan, a spokesman with the Laguna Beach Fire Department, which was keeping an all-night vigil in expectation that the coastal area would receive at least two inches of rainfall--enough to saturate the ground and perhaps unleash floods or mudslides.

Brennan said many residents and business owners in the city had spent the day shoring up their property with sandbags, and the city had deployed earthmoving equipment to strategic locations, ready to be used to keep flood channels open.

A downpour of half an inch of rain in one hour between 8 and 9 p.m. triggered the U.S. Weather Service to issue a flash-flood warning for the Laguna Canyon area.

For four months, Brennan said, the city has been working on erosion-control plans for the burn areas that have withstood several smaller storms.

“This should be the big test,” he said.

Fire officials said a small tornado touched down briefly in Santa Barbara, flattening an outbuilding.

Forecasters predicted more severe thunderstorms--with heavy downpours and scattered hail--before the storm begins to ease sometime tonight.

“It’s going to be nasty,” National Weather Service forecaster Debra Rominger said. “It’s a pretty strong one.”

Bruce Thoren, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., said as much as three inches of rain is expected to fall in the coastal valleys and along the foothills before the storms move out to the east, probably sometime Saturday.

Thoren said there is a slight possibility of even more rain if the cold storm from the Gulf of Alaska hooks up with a broad band of moisture stretching from Hawaii to Baja California.

“Right now, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, but it could,” Thoren said.

The weather service said the storm--unusually cold for this time of year--probably will drop between one and two feet of snow in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains by Saturday night. The snow level in some of the northern ranges is expected to dip as low as 2,500 feet--about the level of the Antelope Valley floor.

In Malibu--where dozens of houses were invaded by mudslides in February after brush fires destroyed scores of homes and stripped hillsides of vegetation last fall--rockslides blocked traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway and on at least four canyon roads leading inland Thursday night.

Most of the slides occurred between 5 and 6 p.m. as heavy rain, sometimes mixed with hail the size of jellybeans, reduced visibility to about 30 feet in some areas. A stream of runoff a foot deep coursed down Las Flores Canyon Road, disappearing into a storm drain at the coast highway.

The rain continued into the night and so did the rockslides. Caltrans crews said they were not sure when they would be able to reopen the PCH, Topanga Canyon Boulevard, Topanga Canyon Road, Big Rock Drive, Las Flores Canyon Road and Tuna Canyon Road.

Many of Malibu’s residents stood watch over sandbag barriers in front of their homes Thursday night, guarding against the possibility of major slides like the ones that damaged homes there last month.

“It’s going to be a long, long night and a long, long weekend,” Kent Knudsen said as he sipped a mug of hot chocolate and gazed balefully at the continuing rain. His house on Pacific Coast Highway was one of those damaged during February’s storms.

“I want to get this trench cleaned out, along with the drain, and then I’ll just do it all over again,” he said. “I just want to keep the mud and water out of the house this time.”

Because sheriff’s deputies would not let traffic through on the PCH, Carole Smith and her 5-year-old son, Shane, had to walk about a mile home in the rain.

“It’s a lovely night for a walk,” she said with only a touch of sarcasm. “I thought about trying to bribe the sheriffs, but I decided not to.”

Sarah Maurice, a spokeswoman for the city of Malibu, said the city had notified residents to prepare for the storm, but added: “We don’t want them to have a false sense of security, because a fire or sheriff official probably will not come knocking on their door to tell them to get out. If they feel they are in danger, they probably are and should just get out.”

Such warnings are old hat in Malibu, where most residents prefer to stick it out.

Michael Spack, who lives midway up Big Rock Drive, was undaunted by the thrashing rain that hit by about 3 p.m.

“We’re keeping our fingers crossed, but the city got all the drains in and did some hydro-seeding so I am feeling pretty safe about it,” Spack said.

In Buena Park, rainwater poured through the roof of a dress shop on Beach Boulevard Thursday evening. The owner of a neighboring pizza parlor, Tony Garcia, who ran to help along with firefighters, said it took them two hours to move the garment racks to a dry area and mop up.

Earlier this week. the prospect of heavy rain and perhaps hail prompted Orange County’s strawberry farmers to hire extra workers to quickly harvest as much of the ripe fruit as possible, said Alan Reynolds, general manager of Treasure Farms in Irvine.

“A hard rain will do damage, and hail will do a lot of damage,” Reynolds said. He predicted that if the storm severely harms the approximately 500 acres of strawberries in Irvine as well as Oxnard’s substantial strawberry crop, the price of the fruit may rise this spring at the supermarkets.

In the Pasadena Glen area--another neighborhood where disastrous brush fires during the fall were followed my destructive mudslides in February--an improved system of culverts and barricades appeared to be protecting homes from storm runoff Thursday night. The rainfall there was steady but not exceptionally heavy during much of the evening, and the streets were deserted as emergency crews retreated to warmer, drier quarters.

Most of Pasadena Glen’s residents had left their homes Thursday afternoon rather than wait for what many feared would be a renewed onslaught of mudslides.

Barriers were in place in the neighborhood--many heavy, steel-braced wooden walls that county flood control crews had erected to divert the anticipated runoff from the homes and into newly paved flood-control channels.

Jim Paul, a 65-year-old retiree who lives with his dog, Biff, in an 18-foot trailer on the lot where his house burned to the ground last fall, was one of the few who decided not to evacuate on Thursday.

“I’ve lived up here for 37 years,” Paul said. “It gets exciting at times. We get to see a lot of nature, only sometimes nature goes on a rampage.”

Times staff writers Leslie Berkman, Mike Carlson and Nieson Himmel contributed to this story.