Where's our usual rain? It's socking S. California

LOS ANGELES — As the latest in a series of epic, drenching storms hovered over Southern California, meteorologists acknowledged what many here had begun to suspect: L.A. has stolen Seattle's thunder.

Quite literally, that is. The low-pressure system that usually camps out over the perennially soggy Pacific Northwest for the winter found itself mysteriously diverted to the typically balmy southland this year.

As of yesterday, downtown Los Angeles had collected 10 inches more rain than Seattle thus far in the season that began in July. And while people in the mountains near Los Angeles have been digging out from some of their deepest snowfalls in nearly a century, ski slopes in Washington and Idaho have been forced to close.

"We're one of the wettest places on the West Coast," said Bruce Rockwell, a specialist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard, an hour up the coast from Los Angeles. "I've never seen it rain like this, and you're talking to somebody that's been in the field for 30 years."

As the latest system moved into its sixth day, it was taking its toll on a landscape already sodden from a succession of storms stretching back before the holidays, turning roadways into rivers and causing great chunks of land to give way.

In Ventura County, officials closed the small Santa Paula airport yesterday after more than 155 feet of runway collapsed into the rushing Santa Clara River. Chunks of concrete crumbled into the water throughout the day.

"We've lost nearly the entire west third of the airport. This is millions and millions of dollars worth of damage," said Rowena Mason, president of the Santa Paula Airport Association.

"With the amount of rain in the short period of time, we're seeing new areas that are experiencing a lot of movement of the land and soil that's creating new hazards," said Ron Haralson, inspector for the Los Angeles County Fire Department. "We're seeing total collapses of hillsides."

Elsewhere, though, the land moved slowly, allowing residents to flee homes they may never live in again. Local television-news crews set up a deathwatch for four homes on a Los Angeles hillside, capturing on film each piece of patio and swimming pool as they crumbled into the void below.

In Oceanside, near San Diego, a mudslide that began last month, forcing the evacuation of six houses on top of a hill, began to threaten the 10 houses that sit beneath it.

Mudslides also covered train tracks along the Pacific coast, forcing Amtrak to suspend service from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara at least through tomorrow, while service north to San Luis Obispo could remain suspended until next week.

A total of 33.09 inches of rain has fallen in Los Angeles since July 1, when California begins its yearly rainfall measurements. That makes it the fourth-rainiest season since meteorologists started keeping records in 1877. Normally the region gets about 15 inches of rain in a year.

By the time the latest storm is expected to move out today, it will likely have pushed the total up by at least another inch, which would nudge the season into third place. Even if California gets only its normal amount of rain through the rest of the spring, it will almost certainly break the all-time record of 38 inches, set in 1883, Rockwell said. And another storm is due next week.

For those who spend their lives studying the weather, it's one for the memory books as well as the record books. Rockwell couldn't believe Southern California had seen five straight days of rain.

"I've seen this much rain over two or three days, but not over five," he said.

Bill Patzert, a NASA climatologist at Cal Tech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, marveled over the staying power of the "slothlike low-pressure system" out of the Gulf of Alaska.

"We've been experiencing this since October," he said. "It's like 'Groundhog Day': Every day I wake up and there's another low-pressure system out of the Gulf of Alaska."

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.