Storms Pound Los Angeles

High winds ripped through part of Los Angeles early Tuesday, upending mobile homes and toppling trees, as a storm dashed through the region with record rainfall.

Traffic accidents during the storm killed two people. Two teen-agers had to be rescued by helicopter from a rushing flood in a drainage channel.

Authorities had reports that a tornado struck in the Paramount neighborhood about eight miles south of downtown Los Angeles, but that had not been confirmed, said Los Angeles County fire Capt. Joe Romero. "We don't have a full idea of what occurred," Romero said.

"We had damage to the mobile home park, power outages throughout a large area, trees down, wires down, damage to cars, debris strewn all over the area," he said.

CBS News Correspondent Sandra Hughes reports that while the damage definitely looks like the imprint of a twister, meteorologists say it might have been what's called a "microburst" of high winds.

The damaging winds, accompanied by three-quarter-inch hail and lightning, came at the end of a powerful Alaska storm that dumped as much as 3 inches of rain on parts of Southern California.

18-year-old Laura Peters was asleep when the winds flipped over her mobile home. "It was scary," says Peters, who climbed out a window with her cat and later had her boyfriend climb in and rescue her pet parrot. "I was flipping over backwards and the TV came at me and I was like, oh no!"

Two teen-agers had to be rescued by helicopter from water rushing at 30 mph down a drainage channel late Monday.

At its peak, the storm flooded city streets and highways from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles and caused traffic collisions at the rate of 75 an hour, including one that involved 25 vehicles.

In Santa Clarita, two people died and several others were injured in a five-vehicle pileup that closed the southbound Golden State Freeway for about an hour. In Glendale, a pickup truck ran into a California Highway Patrol car parked on the shoulder of a freeway. The officer was treated for minor injuries.

"There was a tremendous crash right over the house," said Mary Menzel of west Los Angeles. "The house sort of shook at 4 a.m. It was the most dramatic thunder and lightning. Car alarms went off."

Menzel took it in stride, though. "It was quite wonderful," she said.

She pointed out that when it rains for more than 24 hours, everyone starts to get really nervous. "Because you don’t know how to drive in the rain. You don’t have good rain shoes, because we live in L.A."