Rains flood Southern California

LOS ANGELES – Californians got a lot of what they wanted and not too much of what they didn’t from a major storm that finally blew out of the state Friday.

After drenching Northern California the previous day, the storm dumped up to 5 inches of desperately needed rain in Southern California. A landslide left 10 homes uninhabitable and fire officials executed a dramatic rescue of two people from the Los Angeles River.

The storm also touched off a small tornado in Los Angeles and a water spout off the coast of Newport Beach. It caused flooded streets, rock slides and traffic tie-ups in some areas.

The tornado, with wind speeds of 65 to 85 mph, struck a south Los Angeles intersection shortly before 9:30 a.m., ripping tiles off roofs, damaging trees and mangling a billboard.

“It got a lot of people excited, but thank goodness nobody was hurt,” said Stuart Seto of the National Weather Service.

At the storm’s height, about 50,000 customers lost power, though most had it back quickly.

Still, with few exceptions, damage across the region was minor and the soaking was welcome in a state withered by three years of drought. No serious injuries were reported as the storm exited east toward the desert.

Adriana Fletcher, 39, of Huntington Beach, said her 5-, 6- and 7-year-olds were happy to see the rain after learning about the drought in school.

“When it started raining, my kids were like, ‘This is so cool,’ ” Fletcher said.

As the storm crept down the coast overnight, its powerful winds caused power outages around Santa Barbara, where the National Weather Service said up to 5 inches fell in coastal mountains.

In Camarillo, a Ventura County city about 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles, rain was falling at about an inch an hour over hillsides ravaged by a 2013 wildfire. With few roots to hold the soil in place, and a waxy subsurface layer caused by heat from the flames, the deluge caused part of a hillside to give way.

Debris brushed aside concrete barriers crews had set up on the slope and surrounded about a dozen homes with silt, sticks and rocks – some as large as a couch. The force was so great that two large earthmovers used to set up barriers were swept down to the street, with one nearly buried.

Earthen avalanches also blocked part of the Pacific Coast Highway in Ventura County, north of Malibu.

Near downtown Los Angeles, the fire department rescued two people from the storm-swollen Los Angeles River. Orange County fire officials and Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies each pulled a body from smaller waterways, though in both cases the cause of death wasn’t clear.

Even after the fast-moving storm cleared out, the risk remained that sodden topsoil on wildfire-scarred hillsides could collapse.

A debris flow sent rocks and bricks down streets in suburban Glendora east of Los Angeles, the site of the devastating Colby Fire in January. No injuries or damage to homes were immediately reported.

The threat of slides in several other inland Southern California areas led to some evacuations.