Southland residents, tens of thousands of them without electricity, braced for a second onslaught of cold and freakishly powerful winds late Thursday, having barely had time to assess the fallen trees and shredded rooftops left by the previous night's barrage."Nobody in our department has ever seen such widespread damage. Nobody," said Jon Kirk Mukri, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, talking of scores of city parks so littered with broken branches and teetering trees that they were considered a threat to public safety.Officials took the rare step of temporarily closing Griffith Park because of the windstorm, fearing that downed wires might spark fires in piles of dry, shattered trees. Utility workers struggled to restore power to about 370,000 customers in the city and other areas darkened by the first, and broken traffic lights and downed trees snarled traffic across affected communities.In heavily hit Pasadena, it was a question of where to begin. Sixty people, many of them elderly and disabled, were bused to a Red Cross shelter from an apartment building on Hudson Avenue that flooded after a tree crashed through the roof and broke a water pipe.Roof shingles were peeled off and garage doors knocked askew. Thousands were without power and 200 buildings were damaged, more than three dozen residences so badly that they were "red-tagged" — deemed unsafe to use."Throughout the entire 26 square miles of the city, streets are littered with trees and tree limbs, downed power lines and wires," Pasadena City Manager Michael Beck said in an interview in the basement of City Hall. People who called the local utility were given the grim word: Get some ice. Some flashlights.The message was clear: Prepare for a long night.In South Pasadena, residents were urged to conserve water Thursday morning because a pump to the city's reservoirs failed as part of a widespread power outage, resulting in critically low pressure, authorities said.On Grace Street, Tom Slattery said he lost power about 11:30 p.m. Wednesday and was jolted awake by the storm in the middle of the night. In the morning, "I geared for a cold shower," said Slattery, 38, an attorney. "And then I realized there would be no shower."The windstorm produced a peak gust of 97 mph, reported at Whitaker Peak Wednesday night west of the 5 Freeway north of Castaic. The winds had calmed by morning, but the storm's second round — predicted to be more of a classic version of Santa Ana winds from the northeast — was expected to lash the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood Hills and Malibu before diminishing later Friday. The winds, though in far weaker form, will probably return over the weekend.The foothill communities of the San Gabriel Valley were the hardest hit by the windstorm. States of emergency were declared in Alhambra, South Pasadena, Pasadena, San Marino, San Gabriel, Temple City, Sierra Madre, Monrovia, Glendora and Arcadia.But in places as far away as the Westside, 29,400 Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers were in the dark by daybreak. Thousands were also stripped of power in Los Feliz, Hollywood, Highland Park, El Sereno, Glassell Park, South Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. A power outage in northeast Los Angeles affected pumps supplying water to Mount Washington and some surrounding areas, causing low pressure.No fatalities had been reported by late Thursday, and there was so much damage small and large that officials were loath to put a dollar figure to it. Fences and yard furnishings were ruined, roads blocked, beloved oaks felled. Andrea Alarcon, president of the Board of Public Works, said city officials had received 120 calls of fallen street trees and limbs by 8 a.m. Thursday.In some communities, officials said it would be days, perhaps next week, before roads were cleared. Power outages were so widespread that officials in cities such as San Marino and Temple City estimated that more than 75% of the residents were without electricity.So many lost electricity that the University of California offered the possibility of reprieves on its Nov. 30 application deadlines to last-minute applicants stymied by blackouts.And the storm seemed to save some of its most malicious tricks, Grinch-like, for Christmas preparations:It wreaked havoc on Altadena's Christmas Tree Lane, snapped the top of the 100-foot tree at Americana at Brand in Glendale and blew over Monrovia's city Christmas tree, forcing officials to postpone the community's annual lighting ceremony and Christmas parade.The Americana mall set about repairing its tree by inserting steel rods into the trunk so the top portion could be reattached. But in Monrovia, though residents called City Hall to talk about the fallen tree — a 50-foot evergreen used in Christmas festivities for years — officials were swamped with calls about power outages. ||||| The winds reached 97 mph at one mountain peak. More than 380,000 homes lost power. Thousands of trees snapped, blocking roads and damaging property. Scores of schools were closed, as was Griffith Park. And motorists battled gridlock caused by broken traffic signals and blowing debris.The storm, which produced some of the strongest wind gusts in more than a decade, was caused by a highly unusual weather system that even had experts marveling at its power.While Santa Ana winds are common this time of year, this storm was anything but.The winds were produced by two separate weather systems that channeled cold air from the north into the Los Angeles area.A clockwise high-pressure system was parked over Northern California and the Great Basin as a counter-clockwise low-pressure system hovered over Arizona.Like two massive gears spinning in opposite directions, the systems funneled the winds."In some places we've seen gusts over hurricane force, which for the Southwest part of the country is not something that usually happens," said Brian Edwards, a meteorologist for AccuWeather.com. "This is a one-every-10-years kind of thing."Indeed, the blustery conditions extended across the Southwest, including Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, Arizona and New Mexico. In some places, including Utah, wind gusts topped 100 mph.Experts said one reason for the extensive damage was that the winds were remarkably choppy and unpredictable.In some places, winds suddenly shifted from 10 mph or 20 mph to more than 80 mph. The shift made trees as well as roofs and power lines vulnerable."Everything lined up perfectly," said Bill Patzert, a climatologist for Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada-Flintridge.Trees were no match for the winds, especially those with heavy canopies. Patzert noted that trees in urban Southern California neighborhoods don't have the strong root systems found in more natural environments."L.A. trees don't have deep roots. The urban forest is artificial and is primarily watered by lawn sprinklers," Patzert said. "So what keeps our urban forest alive is people watering their lawns, which are not natural, so you don't have deep root systems. So our trees are very vulnerable to Santa Ana events."Walter Warriner, a Santa Monica arborist and community forester, agreed, adding that the large canopies of many local trees lack strong foundations."When you look at a tree above ground there's a ratio of 20 to 1 compared to below ground, so there's not that many roots holding our big trees in place," he said.While damage was reported across the Southland, communities in the western San Gabriel Valley were particularly hard-hit, including Pasadena, South Pasadena, San Marino, Altadena and La Cañada-Flintridge.National Weather Service meteorologist Eric Boldt said this, too, was unusual.Typically, the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County get the brunt of such windstorms.
– Winds topping 80mph blew down people and power lines and upended enormous trees that crushed cars and houses in a freak storm that raged through Southern California and the Southwest. The craziest Santa Ana winds in more than a decade left hundreds of thousands of people without power. "In some places we've seen gusts over hurricane force, which for the Southwest is not something that usually happens," an AccuWeather meteorologist told the Los Angeles Times. Wind gusts in Utah topped 100mph, knocking over semi-trailer rigs like bowling pins. "Nobody in our department has ever seen such widespread damage. Nobody," said the general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, referring to city parks so littered with broken branches and teetering trees that some had to be shut. All 26 blocks of hard-hit Pasadena are littered with downed wires, trees, and tree limbs. People who called about knocked-out power were told: Get flashlights and ice. And the winds aren't over yet. They're expected to pick up again before finally diminishing later today.