A rare cold wave hit the often sunny California this week as farmers in the Golden State warned that grocery prices would rise sharply because of the freezing weather's devastating effect on crops.

Residents in the Pacific coastal resort town of Malibu near Los Angeles saw snow dropping in nearby mountains on Wednesday, when the cold front lingering in the Southern California area for nearly one week brought a fast-moving hailstorm in a number of communities.

The area has been plagued by freezing overnight temperatures since the weekend, causing a threefold increase in damaged water mains and connections.

But the worst victims of the rarely cold weather, which many people said they had not seen in recent decades, are probably California's farmers, who reportedly lost some 1 billion dollars in frozen oranges and other crops.

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger earlier this week estimated that a series of unusually cold nights could cause the state a total of 1 billion dollars in crop losses, including oranges and other fruits and vegetables.

Schwarzenegger, in a letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, said that extreme weather conditions had a devastating impact on the state's agricultural industry. The governor declared a state of emergency on Tuesday in the 10 counties hardest hit.

The orange crop was particularly hard-hit in the because growers had picked only 30 percent of the state's 193,000 acres of orange groves before the freeze.

In the strongest sign that the freeze will hurt consumers, navel orange prices doubled at the wholesale level, with the highest grade, large-sized navels increasing from up to 17 dollars per bushel last week to about 35 dollars Tuesday, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

California is the nation's dominant source of navels, and unlike other crops, little foreign supply is available.