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Wild fires then ice storms { November 14 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/14/national/14HAIL.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/14/national/14HAIL.html
November 14, 2003
Rain and Hail Deluge a Slice of the Los Angeles Basin
By JOHN M. BRODER
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 13 — Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.
Two weeks after the most destructive wildfires in state history blackened the skies over Southern California, a freak storm deluged Los Angeles on Wednesday night and left piles of hail more than a foot deep in some parts of the city.
In Watts, a neighborhood seldom visited by providence, residents saw the lightning lacing the sky, the water cascading down the streets and the hail pounding on their rooftops as some sort of sign.
"I haven't seen anything like this in all my years," said Tyrone Wright, 52, cleaning up the mud around his tiny home on Alvaro Street. "It's like the Lord said, `I'm going to take Watts and make it snow.' "
National Weather Service officials said 5.3 inches of rain fell at East 96th Street and Central Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles in less than three hours on Wednesday evening. Mark Lenz, a forecaster with the Weather Service's office in Oxnard, Calif., said rain in that amount typically fell on Los Angeles once every 50 or 100 years.
"As far as hail goes, it's definitely unusual to get that amount," Mr. Lenz said.
The most rain ever recorded in a 24-hour period in the Los Angeles basin was 7.33 inches on New Year's Eve in 1933, he said.
Violent weather swept into the Midwest and East as well on Thursday, felling trees, flooding roads and cutting power to nearly a million customers. Waves reached 16 feet on Lakes Erie and Ontario, and hundreds of flights into and out of New York were delayed for several hours. In Victor, N.Y., near Rochester, a large tree fell on a car, killing a 37-year-old woman.
Occasional rainstorms are not unusual this time of year in Southern California, but this one behaved more oddly than most. It came in from the southeast after sitting off the coast for several days collecting moisture, then parked itself over South-Central Los Angeles, particularly Watts and the nearby cities of Compton, South Gate and Lynwood and the community of Willowbrook.
The torrential rains were accompanied by the percussion of thunder and rapid-fire lightning strikes, which took down some power pylons and cut power to as many as 115,000 customers on Wednesday night. Wind gusts forced the temporary closing of the Los Angeles International Airport, about five miles west of what was the center of the storm.
Firefighters rescued more than 100 people from cars and flooded streets.
Mr. Lenz said some parts of South-Central Los Angeles got more than five inches of rain, while only a half-inch fell on downtown Los Angeles, less than 10 miles away, and only a trace was recorded at the airport.
He said the storm was intensified by occasional breaks in the clouds that allowed the ground to heat in some places, creating rising air and greater instability.
"This storm stayed over a five- to eight-mile radius and those columns of rain were just pounding down on that one area," Mr. Lenz said.
In Watts, on East 114th Street just west of Central Avenue, which was narrowed to one lane by piles of pearl-sized hail, children in T-shirts molded balls of ice and threw them at each other and at passing cars. Damarie Fawcett, 13, shoveled out a neighbor's driveway. A gawker in a slow-moving car shouted, "Oooh, Christmas!"
Others in the neighborhood found the storm less amusing. Marina Johnson, 48, said it took her five hours to get home from work, a commute that usually takes 20 minutes.
"Cars were floating by me," Mrs. Johnson said. "I don't know how my car kept going. It was just unbelievable."
When she arrived home, her entire block was dark, she said. The electricity was still out Thursday morning. Power had been restored to most homes by Thursday evening.
Across the street, Pierre and Cheryl Frisson took their children to play in the piles of hail on East 114th Street. Their school was flooded and closed. Mr. Frisson said he had seen a school bus floating down the street the night before.
A trickle of water flowed down the 10-foot-deep storm canal below them. On Wednesday night, they said, the surging water overflowed the canal's concrete banks, spewing flotsam throughout the neighborhood, which could still be seen clinging to chain-link fences and the trunks of trees.
After the wildfires ravaged 750,000 acres across Southern California late last month, officials worried that winter rains would set off damaging mudslides on denuded hillsides. But while the storm brought as much as six inches of snow to some Southern California mountain peaks, the fire-damaged hills were largely spared the heavy rains.
The first significant rains of the season came on Halloween night, effectively killing the wildfires that erupted a week earlier. But the region has still suffered from below-average rainfall for two years.
Leonard Cash, 24, said he was in his car in Compton during the Wednesday storm and opened his door and a slurry of rain and hail poured in.
"I was walking in it, and I couldn't feel from my knees down," he said.
But by this morning, only a trace of the hail remained in his yard on Alvaro Street in Watts, melted by the sun in the 60-degree weather.
"You don't expect this here, especially not in Watts," Mr. Cash said. "But this morning it was looking good out here. It was a Watts wonderland."
Chris Dixon reported for this article.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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