Winds Down 100-Foot Tree, Cut S.D. Power

Arctic winds tore through Southern California over the weekend, downing power poles like match sticks, knocking out electricity to thousands of homes, littering streets with tons of debris and raising concerns about shelter for the homeless.

In San Diego, farmers and operators of shelters for the homeless braced themselves for a night of near- and below-freezing temperatures as winds up to 38 m.p.h lashed through the county Sunday.

The high winds also toppled a 100-foot tree onto a truck in La Mesa on Sunday afternoon, seriously injuring its two occupants, and was the cause of several scattered power outages throughout San Diego. In addition, many county highways and streets were littered with tree branches and debris because of the high winds.

Elsewhere in Southern California, winds were clocked at 50 to 60 m.p.h., with gusts up to 80 m.p.h. reported in parts of the San Bernardino Valley.

Hardest hit was the San Bernardino County city of Rancho Cucamonga, where winds exceeding 60 m.p.h. blew down 80 power poles along a 1 1/2-mile stretch of Baseline Road, officials said. At least two of those poles fell on cars, but no injuries were reported, a sheriff’s official said Sunday.

One After Another

“They came down just like dominoes,” city maintenance supervisor Bob Zetterberg said of the line of power poles. “It looks like a war zone out here.”

The winds in San Diego were not that powerful, but the 38 m.p.h. gusts recorded at Lindbergh Field Sunday afternoon were the fastest winds recorded at the airport since mid-March, according to National Weather Service forecaster Wilbur Shigehara.

In La Mesa, Marion and Dorothy Miller were seriously injured about 1:30 p.m. Sunday when winds blew a 100-foot eucalyptus tree over onto their pickup truck at Bancroft Drive and Mariposa Street. To rescue the Spring Valley couple, firefighters had to remove the vehicle’s roof.

Late Sunday night, Dorothy Miller, 80, was reported in critical condition at Sharp Memorial Hospital with internal and head injuries, while her 83-year-old husband was in serious but stable condition, a hospital spokeswoman said.

The San Diego power outages attributed to the high winds occurred primarily in the northern coastal areas, Vista and Fallbrook, according to SDG&E; spokeswoman Elizabeth Pecsi. Most of the outages were relatively minor ones that affected no more than several hundred customers at any one time, Pecsi added.

However, some residents in Oceanside were without power for most of the day Sunday, according to a spokesman for the Oceanside Police Department.

Relief Expected by Tuesday

The blustery and chilly weather was attributed to an Arctic air mass coursing through Southern California, Shigehara said. Some relief is expected by Tuesday night as the cold front moves east and the high winds calm down.

While the coldest temperature recorded Saturday night in the county was 28 degrees in Valley Center, temperatures were expected to drop Sunday night to close to 20 degrees in Bonsall and into the mid-20s in other low-lying inland areas such as Rincon, Pauma Valley and El Cajon, according to Shigehara.

“About once every 30 years we get temperatures below 20 degrees somewhere in the county,” Shigehara said. “It is very, very unusual to get hit with below 20-degree temperatures for two years in a row.”

The low temperatures posed a particularly serious threat to area citrus and avocado growers, agriculture officials said. If the overnight temperatures drop below 29 degrees, potentially serious damage to citrus and avocado crops can be expected, according to Vincent Lazaneo, a farm adviser for UC Cooperative Extension.

In most cases, Lazaneo explained, the local citrus and avocado crops are not mature enough to harvest, “so picking isn’t an option, even if you could do it fast enough.” Instead, growers may turn on their irrigation systems to add a few degrees to the soil temperature, use wind machines to help pull down warmer air and use smudge pots in the fields, but even those alternatives are of limited use when temperatures are in the 20s, Lazaneo said.

“Those things only give you a few degrees added protection, at most,” Lazaneo said. “When it gets down close to 20 degrees, it’s pretty much a wait-and-see situation. There just isn’t too much you can do about it.”

Number of Cold Hours

It was not only the coldness itself which was worrying growers, but the expected duration of the below-freezing temperatures, according to Shigehara.

“We consider it a ‘dangerously’ cold night when temperatures drop below 24 or 25 degrees in agricultural areas,” Shigehara said. “(Sunday) night, temperatures will be below that in some areas for as much as 15 hours. . . . There’s going to be a lot of activity out in the field the next couple of nights.”

At the San Diego Zoo, the low temperatures Saturday night prompted officials to place heat lamps in the quarters of some of the zoo’s large cats and other warm-weather animals. Zoo operations manager Michael Ahlering said that workers also moved some of the zoo’s exotic plants from the zoo’s lower sections to its higher elevations, where temperatures can be as much as 15 degrees higher.

After smaller than expected crowds at some San Diego homeless shelters Saturday night, the shelters’ operators were anticipating being filled to capacity Sunday night.

“I think word of mouth will do the trick,” said Father Joe Carroll of the St. Vincent de Paul Joan Kroc Center, which expanded its 300-bed capacity by placing 130 cots in a meeting room and dining area.

On Saturday night, only about 60 of the shelter’s extra 130 beds were filled, Carroll said, partly because temperatures downtown were relatively mild in the early evening hours. However, the colder weather that was expected Sunday night “should bring the guys in off the street,” Carroll said.

Los Angeles’ homeless also were forced to endure more cold than usual. The city invoked a Stage 1 alert for the homeless Sunday because temperatures were predicted to fall to about 40 degrees overnight. Such alerts, which are triggered automatically when temperatures dip to below 40 degrees in clear weather and 50 degrees in rain, call for housing vouchers to be distributed to the homeless.

This is the sixth time that the alert has been called this winter.

Late Sunday, city officials decided to open two additional shelters as well.

Caught by Two Systems

Pat Cooper, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times, explained that California was caught between a high-pressure area centered off the Oregon coast and a vigorous low-pressure area over New Mexico.

“Think of a high pressure as a dome of air, and a low pressure as a sinking hole of air,” she said. “And the gradient between these two systems is pretty stiff. That means that the air will fall fast--the wind will blow hard--from the high to the low, just the way water will fall from high to low ground.”

What most Southern California residents saw of the windstorm was litter from literally thousands of tree limbs that damaged cars, roofs, and gardens and made driving through many neighborhoods difficult.

Christmas decorations blew down in Beverly Hills. Freeway signs snapped off poles in Altadena. People running Christmas tree lots vainly tried to keep their trees standing, but most ultimately gave up and laid the trees down to protect them from the powerful gusts.

Storefront windows in Hollywood, Pasadena and elsewhere were shattered by the winds, which first began to kick up late Saturday afternoon. Outdoor furniture was blown off patios and into flower beds. Empty trash cans rattled down streets.

The wind tossed about something much larger in Altadena. A helicopter parked above Chaney Trail was blown about 10 feet down a hillside, apparently before dawn Sunday, said Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Greg Lee.

Southern California Edison leased the chopper from a private firm. Officials closed Chaney Trail until the aircraft could be removed today. No damage estimate was available.

In Arcadia, the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum was forced to close Sunday after wind left the park littered with branches. Several large eucalyptus and oak trees, including a large old spreading oak that was a visitor favorite, crashed during the high winds, park tour guide George Reuter said.

“This storm measures up there with the worst,” Reuter said. “It’s pretty bad.”

A spark blown out of a chimney by strong winds touched off a blaze that spread quickly, gutting two homes and damaging two others in a L.A. hilltop neighborhood in the Eagle Rock area. No one was injured, but the four homes sustained more than $300,000 in damage, Battalion Chief Clark Cornwell said.

The San Bernardino County city of Chino had a unique fire problem. Fire Department Battalion Cmdr. Tom Maxham said high winds touched off at least half a dozen manure fires Saturday night and Sunday in the city’s dairy area, one of the largest in the United States.

Area fertilizer companies keep large mounds of manure on hand; decomposition deep within stacks creates heat, which was fanned into flames by strong winds, Maxham explained. Firefighters quickly extinguished the flames and no one was injured and no buildings were damaged.

Times staff writers Richard Holguin, Laurie Becklund, Patt Morrison and Nieson Himmel in Los Angeles and Louis Sahagun in Riverside-San Bernardino also contributed to this article.