Rain Los Angeles County

For most of the year, the name Riverwood Ranch is something of a misnomer. Riverwood's river is little more than a 100-yard wide swath of gravel and dust--the Big Tujunga Wash. But on those rare days when normally sunny skies unleash torrential rains, the 100 or so residents of this Sunland-Tujunga neighborhood have learned to be prepared.

Another dreary day in paradise. If it rains again today, as forecasters expect, it will be the seventh day in a row that the sunny Southland has been all that it's not supposed to be. Gray, chilly and wet. The mountains have been smothered by cloud banks, the beaches bikini-free and the swimming pools lonely. "Enough is enough.

Jim Eakins awoke in a strange hotel room Friday morning with the disquieting knowledge that he had lost his home. Literally, lost it. The 28-foot wooden powerboat he had lived on for five years had simply vanished, ripped from its mooring in this week's stunning storm and tossed wildly through Los Angeles Harbor. Eakins had no clue where his floating home might be.

The streets of Los Angeles have been soaked by storms, but, so far this year, they have been free of something else often associated with rain--sewage. Two months ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sued Los Angeles for violations of the Clean Water Act, saying its past rate of sewage spills, averaging 50 per month, was inordinately high. Since then, the city has weathered this winter's storms with no sewage overflows. Almost 14 inches of rain has fallen in Los Angeles since Jan.

Malibu's crucial stretch of Pacific Coast Highway, the Malibu Lagoon Bridge, was opened to four lanes of traffic Thursday after the first phase of a $9.2-million reconstruction project was completed in five weeks--100 days ahead of schedule. The bridge was closed in January after unusually punishing storms buckled the structure, blocking all but foot access between the east and west ends of Malibu for a week.

Thunderstorms lashed the Antelope Valley on Thursday, bringing lightning strikes that sparked several fires and caused power outages while rain flooded streets, authorities said. Lightning struck an abandoned trailer in the 20300 block of East Avenue Q-12 near 203rd Street in Llano shortly after 3 p.m., said Los Angeles County Fire Inspector Ed Loney. The bolt set the trailer ablaze and touched off a one-acre brush fire. Lightning ignited another brush fire at Highway 138 and 263rd Street E.

Another dreary day in paradise. If it rains again today, as forecasters expect, it will be the seventh day in a row that the sunny Southland has been all that it's not supposed to be. Gray, chilly and wet. The mountains have been smothered by cloud banks, the beaches bikini-free and the swimming pools lonely. "Enough is enough.

After a week of blessedly dry weather, moderate rain showers returned to Ventura County on Friday afternoon as the first in a series of expected storms swept through the area, the National Weather Service said. But the fast-moving storm front is expected to leave less than an inch of rain and move on on as early as today, said Tim McClung, the National Weather Service's warning coordination meteorologist in Oxnard. "We may luck out," McClung said.

Last week's rainstorms in Southern California caused more than $88 million in damage, according to revised estimates released Thursday. Three Pacific storms pummeled the region, dumping more than a foot of rain in some areas. Rain washed out roads, damaged hundreds of homes and triggered mudslides. At least seven deaths have been blamed on the storms.

Here is a look at the results of the storms that began deluging the Southland Feb. 6. * CASUALTIES: Seven dead: two in Los Angeles County and five in Ventura County. * PROPERTY DAMAGE: An estimated $23 million to public and private property, not including cleanup costs. * PRECIPITATION: The storms brought 7.96 inches of rain to the L.A. Civic Center, nearly three-quarters of the amount that fell all last season. Woodland Hills, one of the hardest-hit communities, got 16.

A late-season storm swept out of Southern California with a flourish Tuesday, spawning a gale in Paramount that snapped power poles, ripped off roofs and overturned a mobile home. Before daybreak, darkness exploded as power transformers arced in white flashes and the wind wrenched aluminum siding from trailers and hurled it into the air. By afternoon, meteorologists had determined that the phenomenon had not been a tornado, but a micro-burst--a furious downdraft of cold air.

The cold, blustery storm that rolled into Southern California from the Gulf of Alaska on Monday dropped snow in the mountains and contributed to at least one fatal crash and hundreds of other accidents. The rain is expected to stop today, leaving mostly cloudy skies and temperatures in the mid-60s, meteorologists said. The rest of the week should be cool and dry, as a mass of arctic air is dragged in behind the rain.

A powerful Pacific storm pummeled Southern California with rain, wind and snow Wednesday, snarling commuter traffic with scores of fender-benders and sending torrents of muddy runoff down normally dry washes and riverbeds. But despite the heavy runoff, there weren't many mudslides and rock falls, even below hillsides stripped bare by recent brush fires. In South Los Angeles, employees fled into downpours when winds tore part of the roof from a church where they worked.

Saturday's rainstorm didn't pack the wallop predicted, but Southern California skiers and winter resorts, suffering through one of the warmest and driest seasons in years, rejoiced over the first significant snowfall to blanket local mountains. Several inches of fresh powder were reported in forest towns from Wrightwood to Big Bear, and more is expected in the days ahead as a series of Pacific storms rolls over the region. "We're in the game now.

Thunderstorms lashed the Antelope Valley on Thursday, bringing lightning strikes that sparked several fires and caused power outages while rain flooded streets, authorities said. Lightning struck an abandoned trailer in the 20300 block of East Avenue Q-12 near 203rd Street in Llano shortly after 3 p.m., said Los Angeles County Fire Inspector Ed Loney. The bolt set the trailer ablaze and touched off a one-acre brush fire. Lightning ignited another brush fire at Highway 138 and 263rd Street E.

Would-be visitors to Los Angeles have followed the recent blusters of El Nino with great distress. They know that 13 1/2 inches of rain since Feb. 1 does not bode well for a sunny winter vacation on the beaches of Southern Cal. If they only knew the whole story. The measurements that most of the country and the world see when checking out the weather in Los Angeles come from a National Weather Service station at the Civic Center downtown.

A nonprofit group has scheduled a major cleanup of the Los Angeles River from the Sepulveda Basin to Long Beach this Saturday. The Los Angeles River Project, which is heading the cleanup effort, will target debris--from branches to rocks to household appliances--that washed down the river during the recent heavy rains. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors declared Saturday "Operation Clean Sweep Day" in honor of the project and offered assistance from county departments.

In keeping with the unusual happenings of the strangest winter meeting in years, Santa Anita announced before the improvised 11-race card began Monday that racing for Wednesday and Thursday, normally the next two racing days, had been postponed because of continued rain-related difficulty filling fields. The next racing is scheduled for Friday, with the two lost days to be made up, probably on Mondays, before the season ends on April 18.

As a film sound editor, Mike Clark has a ready illustration of the profound isolation of this unincorporated town of about 2,000. "It's so quiet here, my friends come up from L.A. to record the sound of a passing car," he said, pressing one boot into a bank of mud in front of his storm-ravaged home. "You just can't get that quiet down there. . . . We're the best-kept secret in L.A. County."

The first El Nino-related storm of the season lumbered in from the Pacific on Friday, roiling surf, unleashing mudslides and raising the demand for sandbags across Southern California. The storm, which is expected to last until Sunday morning, sent eight-foot waves roaring to the shore in Malibu. Winds across the region gusted to 50 mph. Scattered power outages affecting about 3,000 homes were reported throughout the Southland, including one that left a small section of Glendale without power.