Rain Hits Central Coast on Halloween Night

An extremely dry, drought-stricken Central Coast got a good soaking from a strong and fast-moving storm that made landfall in San Luis Obispo County late Friday afternoon.

A steady rain fell over Pismo Beach sending a surge of runoff through the waterfront area that still saw its share of Halloween night revelers.

“Its something else”, one woman said while walking near the Pismo Pier without an umbrella, “we were driving we saw the clouds, we knew it was coming but we came downtown anyway.”

Early predictions were for as much as an inch of rain in the San Luis Obispo and northern Santa Barbara County areas.

“They predicted it for the past couple of weeks, and they just haven’t gotten it”, another man said holding his dog inside his jacket also without an umbrella, “but tonight I guess they got it right, its very rainy out tonight.”

The heavy rain will cause some crop loss for local farmers but many welcome the first major storm of the season.

“Actually there’s a benefit to the plants in the long run”, says long time Santa Maria Valley farmer and berry grower Patrick Sheehy, “it helps to wash down the salts and kind of cleans the plants off of the dust, and right now the dust has been the biggest factor and that brings in a lot of insects and mites with it.”

The storm was not enough to keep weekend visitors away from the popular Pismo coast area.

“Just the way things have been going, that I thoughtit was just a bunch of talk”, another man said with his wife and son scrambling to get out of the downpour near the Pismo Pier, “I didn’t think it was going to hit, so I was surprised that itactually came, they kept on saying, oh its going to come, there’s a storm coming, Friday, no, uh, uh.”

Forecasts call for a slight chance of rain on Saturday across the Central Coast before clearing by Sunday.