Storms

A powerful winter-like storm is expected to batter fire-ravaged hillsides in Los Angeles County with 3 to 6 inches of rain beginning tonight and lasting through early Wednesday morning. As news of the coming wet weather circulated Monday, residents in charred foothill areas scrambled to fill sandbags or pack their belongings and flee areas prone to flooding. Officials also worked to place huge concrete mudslide barriers along roads in areas including La Cañada Flintridge. The storm, which originated in the Gulf of Alaska, is expected to combine with moisture-laden remnants of a typhoon from the western Pacific, making the system wetter than normal, the National Weather Service said.

Facing forecasts of wet weather that could flush tons of urban trash out to sea and onto local beaches, Los Angeles County authorities scrambled Thursday to reinstall a boom across the outlet of the Los Angeles River to keep debris out of Long Beach Harbor. The boom had been decommissioned Monday because the county Department of Public Works ran out of money to keep it operating.

If meteorologists are right, the storm of the year may be on its way to Steven Hand's backwoods patch of eastern Orange County, potentially transforming the steep, charred slopes encircling his family home into fast-moving rivers of mud and rocks. He knows all this, but on Thursday he just shrugged. "You can't stop a mudslide," said Steven, 16, who has lived on his family's isolated 14-acre plot in Modjeska Canyon his whole life.

Forecasters reached a consensus last fall, predicting another extremely dry winter in the Southland. Then came the rains, with the latest scattered showers beginning Monday, driving up rainfall totals to levels meteorologists admit look a lot like . . . normal. But don't ask them to revise the dry winter forecast just yet. "I'm sticking with it, even though we have a storm coming in," said Bill Patzert, a climatologist for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge.

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.

The wave of storms battering Southern California began to take its toll Friday, causing avalanches that killed one skier and left another near death in Wrightwood, flooding roads and threatening additional damage as more rain approaches. The new round of storms was expected to begin about 6 tonight, bringing up to 5 inches of rain to Los Angeles County, up to 3 inches in Orange County and up to 8 inches in Riverside and San Bernardino counties by Monday morning.

It all happened so fast, and so easily. Oscar R. Gonzales, 24, had snowboarded on this mountain for years. He knew just how to maneuver 20 feet off the trail at Mountain High ski resort in northeast Los Angeles County and go speeding through a familiar grove of trees. This time, in thick powder at about 3 p.m. Friday, his board hit a rock. He plummeted 30 feet off the back side of the ridge, landing on another rock so hard that it carved a dark red welt on the skin of his back.

A winter storm blanketed the middle of the country on Friday, leaving residents to dig their cars and front walkways out from beneath mountains of powder, while roads from the Great Lakes to Texas turned dangerously icy. Hundreds of schools were closed in southeast and southern Michigan, where as much as 5 inches of snow covered the ground. Commuters in St. Louis -- which got at least 8 inches -- struggled to navigate through miles of snarled traffic and fender-benders.

The image of a catastrophic natural disaster that humbled a powerful leader may have stalked Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao as he made rapid-fire visits last week to areas devastated by snowstorms, but it probably wasn't Hurricane Katrina. Try going back a few centuries. In a country where history is never far from the surface, the events back in 1351 and 1644 may weigh on leaders' minds.

High surf that was expected to pound Southern California with waves as high as 28 feet fizzled as the day wore on Monday, leaving surfers disappointed by less-than-epic conditions. But authorities warned that rough seas still made fishing from jetties dangerous. "Swells get hyped up a lot on the Internet. It was supposed to be 15 feet here today," said surfer Josh Fuller, 25, of Newport Beach, surveying breaks that were less than a third that size.