A fierce winter storm left the Southland's mountain regions battered and snow-crusted Thursday, and hundreds of motorists found themselves stranded along Interstate 5 in the Tejon Pass after public safety officials ordered the key artery closed indefinitely as they braced for yet another icy tempest.
Frustrated commuters and truckers spent Wednesday night and Thursday morning trapped in the notorious Grapevine area north of Los Angeles before the California Highway Patrol finally cleared them to move in the early afternoon. Some residents of lower mountain elevations were snowed in, while heavy rains caused traffic accidents and minor flooding in Southern California lowlands.
"We just had to park there and sleep," said trucker Ted Dale, who was snowed in Wednesday night near Gorman. He was heading from Los Angeles to Seattle with a load of pineapples Wednesday night when the CHP ordered him to stop his 18-wheeler on the freeway. "There was no place to turn around."
About 30 passengers on a Greyhound bus heading from Southern California to Sacramento were forced to sleep in the vehicle overnight in the middle of the freeway. They were still stranded in Gorman 24 hours later because their driver had reached his limit on the number of hours he was allowed to operate the vehicle, and no fresh drivers could reach them to take over, the passengers said.
"This is worse than jail," said passenger Ilario Cazarez, a dance promoter from Los Angeles who was trying to make his way to Portland.
About 70,000 motorists travel through the serpentine Grapevine each day. Closure of the the state's major north-south artery caused major traffic headaches.
In addition to causing traffic mayhem, snow forced scientists at Mount Wilson Observatory to shut down their telescopes as staff pulled out snowplows that spent last winter in storage.
In another strange climate turn late Thursday night, the National Weather Service issued two tornado warnings for southwest Los Angeles County, including Malibu, Pacific Palisades and the Topanga area. The weather service said a strong rotating thunderstorm was spotted about 9 p.m. over the eastern half of Malibu, moving north-northeast at about 20 mph.
Much earlier in the day, Los Angeles County saw light snowfall as low as 3,000 feet, with up to a foot sticking at 3,500 feet and 18 inches sticking at 4,500 to 5,500 feet, according to Stuart Seto, a weather specialist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. Nearly 2 feet of snow fell in the Lockwood Valley.
