RAINS BRING PILE-UPS : DESPITE WEATHER WOES, ONLY ONE SERIOUS INJURY CRASH OCCURS IN SCV.

Byline: Bhavna Mistry Daily News Staff Writer

As Mother Nature showered the Southland with an unusually early first rain of the season, Santa Clarita motorists were greeted with a traffic nightmare.

A Northern California woman was the only seriously injured victim in a series of rain-related chain-reaction collisions that coincided with the morning deluge.

``This is an unusual system for this time of the year,'' said Dedric Walker, meteorologist with the National Weather Service. ``This is an unusual amount of rain for this time of the year.''

The injured woman, Michelle Aguirre, 29, remained in critical condition Wednesday afternoon at Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital. Investigators said they suspect she was either drunk or on drugs when she crashed her pickup truck on Chiquito Canyon Road just north of Highway 126.

``She drifted off the side of the roadway and overcorrected to the left going up a hill where her truck's cab hit a telephone poll 12 feet above the roadway,'' said Officer Wendy Moore, a spokeswoman for the California Highway Patrol. ``We know she was under the influence but we're not sure of what or to what extent. We haven't been able to get any tests because of her injuries.''

Walker of the Weather Service said that 0.64 inches of rain fell in the area in the overnight storm, and that rainfall levels were measured at the Los Angeles Civic Center. The storm, he said, would be gone in time for Halloween.

``The rain should be gone by (today,)'' said Walker. ``We have thunderclouds developing in the north above Santa Barbara County and they are moving east-southeast, out of our area.

``The first rains are always the most hazardous,'' Moore said. ``People want to drive normally and forget that it's raining.''

The first of the accidents began shortly after 10 p.m., when a tractor trailer traveling southbound in the truck lane of the Golden State Freeway lost control and crashed into a guardrail.

Suffering minor injuries, the driver was treated at the scene, where both southbound truck lanes were closed for 90 minutes following the accident.

But before officers were able to close the lanes, three other trucks crashed in the area minutes after the first accident.

The mess kept the northbound truck lanes closed until 2 p.m. Wednesday.

An hour later on the southbound side of the truck lane, a pickup truck pulling a horse trailer collided with a big rig and two more rigs tangled.

At midmorning, three cars collided when they failed to stop for slowing traffic on the southbound Antelope Valley Freeway just north of San Fernando Road. Then a big rig jackknifed, its cab hanging over the side of the freeway.

``Nobody anticipates how the rain will affect the stopping distance,'' said Moore. ``The roadways are extremely slick. A lot of debris hasn't been washed off the roads yet.''

Six other crashes caused by rain were reported along the Golden State Freeway in the region, but resulted in no serious injuries.

Throughout the day, power outages in Santa Clarita affected some 3,400 customers, a spokeswoman for Southern California Edison said.

``We had scattered outages throughout the Santa Clarita Valley all due to the storm,'' said Denise Henderson.

The largest outage occurred about 9 p.m. Tuesday, lasting a little more than an hour.

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Photo: (1-2--Color) John Grey, left, puts his best face skyward as rain falls in Canyon Country on Wednesday afternoon. The rain caused several mishaps on the Antelope Freeway on Wednesday morning, including one, below, in which a big rig slid off the southbound lanes near Placerita Canyon.

Shaun Dyer/Special to the Daily News