Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS : COUNTY : Rainy Season Gets Away to Good, Bad Start

The first winter rains rolled in a little behind schedule, but they left their legacy in Orange County, dropping 2.24 inches in Brea in a 24-hour period ending last Sunday afternoon, according to county officials.

It also meant there was some of that cold, white stuff in mountain resort areas that had been hurting without it this season.

Big Bear Lake Resort Assn. spokeswoman Maggie Sanderson said it snowed on and off last Sunday and Monday, and the reaction from die-hard skiers was predictable. “We were taking reservations for the middle of February,” she said.

The storm clouds also proved deadly for one county resident, and there were some serious accidents on rain-slick roads.

Sixteen-year-old Anthony Pfaffly of Silverado Canyon suffered fatal injuries when the car he was riding in went out of control and collided head-on with another car on Silverado Canyon Road. Pfaffly died at 4:10 a.m. last Monday.

A 21-year-old El Toro man was seriously injured last Sunday morning when he crashed his motorcycle in the rain on the Santa Ana Freeway. Mud slides closed Carbon Canyon Road briefly and another slide closed the Orange Freeway in Diamond Bar, backing up traffic for several miles.

In Fullerton, some clogged drains allowed water to pond to a depth of three or four feet at one intersection, leaving about 10 cars stalled in the deep water at once.

The situation became so serious that the California Highway Patrol had to close a freeway off-ramp to prevent more traffic from wading through the mess.

With all the trouble, one county official said, residents can count themselves lucky in one regard. If the storm had come just five days earlier, when an unusual alignment of the sun, the moon and the earth caused the highest tides in decades, the results might have been catastrophic.