Santa Paula was near the top of countywide measuring gauges after a heavy rainfall that started late Friday and lingered into Saturday morning.
But at times heavy rain did not do much more than slightly dampen the three-year record drought that has caused mandatory cutbacks.
The October 31 rainstorm held off long enough to allow Halloween trick-or-treaters to haunt neighborhoods and gather candy.
At about 10:15 p.m. it started to rain and rained even more coming down hard. So hard in fact that some Santa Paula streets experienced what was akin to flash flooding with evidence of water flows well over curbs and onto sidewalks visible in several locations.
The Santa Paula Peak area saw some rain gauges with 1.6 inches of water while the Ventura County Watershed Protection District reported Santa Paula received 0.78 inches of rain since Friday and had recorded a scant 0.01 inches since the rain season began last month.
The good news is the accumulated rainfall is 136.2 percent ahead of Santa Paula’s “normal” year to date rainfall of 0.58 inches, the bad news is forecasters believe this storm will be it for a while at least this coming week. Temperatures are expected to be hovering around the mid-80s - 10 to 15 degrees above normal - by midweek.
The rainstorm was enough to do significant damage in Camarillo Springs where a swift moving slide made up of mud and debris from last year’s Spring Fire flowed into a neighborhood at about 12:30 a.m. Saturday morning. One home - where firefighters had to rescue the owner, trapped inside by the waist-high mud flow - was red-tagged and other residences damaged; a portion of the neighborhood was evacuated for several hours. Investigators believe the cause was not a landslide but rather a storm drain system overwhelmed by the debris and mud.
In all, the storm only lasted two to three hours and brought with it below-average temperatures.
As of Saturday afternoon, the 24-hour rainfall totals (in inches) for various locations in the county were: Camarillo Airport, 0.73; Fillmore, 0.67; Moorpark, 0.58; Newbury Park, 0.3; Ojai, 0.83; Oxnard Airport, 0.52; Piru, 0.68; Port Hueneme, 0.61; Rose Valley, 0.91; Simi Valley, 0.53; Somis, 0.83; Thousand Oaks, 0.37; and Ventura City Hall, 1.01.
