A Day of Weather Wonders--This Is May?

An unusually cold and powerful May storm started edging out of the Southland on Wednesday after apparently spawning a couple of small tornadoes and dumping heavy rain in the valleys and up to 2 feet of snow in the mountains.

One of the tornadoes--if that’s what they were--ripped the roof off an auto repair shop in Long Beach. The other skipped through Ventura County, barely touching down and doing no significant damage.

The rare snow prompted a rare move: the mid-May reopening of two Southern California ski resorts that already had closed for the season.

Brief but intense thundershowers were reported in foothill communities throughout the day, and officials said gusty winds and limited visibility may have contributed to the crash of a light plane near Gorman that killed the pilot.

Precipitation totals increased to near-record levels Wednesday as Los Angeles approached the final month of an El Nino-augmented rainfall season that sometimes seems as though it will never end.

The National Weather Service said 0.84 of an inch of rain fell at the Los Angeles Civic Center between 1 a.m. and 3 p.m. Wednesday, raising the total for the season--which runs from July 1 through June 30--to 30.96 inches.

That’s well more than twice the normal season’s total for the date of 14.69 inches and the most rain that has fallen on Los Angeles since the 31.28 inches recorded during the last El Nino season, in 1982-83.

Statewide, a total of 74,506 victims of this year’s largely El Nino-related storms have applied for Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance, the agency said Wednesday. More than half--41,541--are from Los Angeles County, FEMA said.

The current storm generated some furious winds as it began to head east into Arizona on Wednesday.

Witnesses said an apparent tornado destroyed the roof of a repair shop at a Ford dealership in Long Beach shortly after 5 a.m., but no one was injured.

Fernando Flores said he was at work, cleaning up the dealership’s main building, when violent winds began to blow and he “heard a loud noise.” Flores said he stepped outside in the pouring rain to see that the roof of the repair shop behind the main building had disintegrated.

Firefighters tried to cover the damaged structure with tarpaulins, but the winds were too strong, according to Long Beach Fire Capt. Keith Seward.

The weather service said officials at Point Mugu in Ventura County reported seeing a funnel cloud about 10 a.m. “that touched down briefly” in open fields near Camarillo, causing no damage.

Air traffic controllers at March Air Force Base near Riverside said that they saw a funnel cloud moving through the area but that it did not appear to have reached the ground.

Whether the cyclonic winds reported in Long Beach and Ventura County actually were from tornadoes had yet to be verified. However, in both cases, witnesses described a spinning funnel reaching from the base of the clouds to the ground, and that, in meteorological terms, constitutes a tornado.

Tornadoes scatter debris in circular patterns, meteorologists said, and a study of the damage patterns should determine in the next several days whether tornadoes actually struck.

Although reports of tornadoes here seem to have increased in recent years, that’s probably because of better reporting and more thorough investigation, said Gary Ryan, a weather service meteorologist.

Ryan said twisters in Southern California really aren’t that uncommon, but most of them are “baby tornadoes” compared with their much bigger, much more powerful brethren in the Midwest.

Strong gusts were reported Wednesday in the Gorman area, where a single-engine plane crashed into a ridge during a rain squall, fatally injuring the unidentified pilot, who was flying alone. Officials said the weather may have been a factor in the accident. It was not immediately determined where the plane took off or where it was heading.

The plane’s registration number belonged to a 1972 Bellanca, said Wayne Pollack, an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.

Snow fell off and on throughout the day in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains, with 2 feet and more at resort levels by midafternoon.

The Snow Valley resort in Running Springs and New Mountain High in Wrightwood said they were reopening and would remain open at least through Sunday.

Lighter snow from the northern edge of the storm fell in the High Sierra, with about 6 inches reported at Truckee and about 4 inches at Incline Village.

The storm is expected to be gone by this morning, with partly cloudy skies today and hazy sunshine Friday.

“By Saturday, though, we could be dealing with another one,” said John Sherwin, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times.

Times correspondents Patrick Kerkstra in Long Beach, Nick Green in Ventura County and Darrell Satzman in the San Fernando Valley contributed to this story.