Utility Crews Fixing Wind Damage : 275,000 Users Lost Power as Santa Anas Pummeled Southland

The loud noise startled Kathy Folkers awake at 5:30 a.m. She dismissed it as a board clattering in the wind, hugged her sleeping husband, Ed, and went back to sleep in their temporary home--a trailer in Trabuco Oaks.

At dawn Saturday, the 29-year-old mother of three discovered what had interrupted her twilight reverie: Their soon-to-be-finished dream house a few yards away had collapsed on itself, toppled by cyclone-force winds howling down the canyon in Trabuco Oaks.

“I told Ed, ‘My God, the house is down,’ ” Kathy Folkers recalled Sunday as she and her husband, the children, four dogs and a goat surveyed the wreckage of what had been the frame of a two-story, 2,800-square-foot house.

“He didn’t believe me. But after about the third time I told him, he finally got up and looked,” she said.

As weary utility company crews crisscrossed Orange County Sunday, repairing power and telephone lines downed by 80-m.p.h. Santa Ana winds that lashed the Southland for more than 24 hours, Melinda Miller of Orange was praying it wouldn’t rain.

The Miller family had actually been on top of their two-story home nailing down shingles only minutes before a gusting wind lifted off half the roof and plopped it in the junior high school playground behind their home about 9 a.m. Saturday.

“Look, natural skylight,” Miller, 43, said wryly Sunday, pointing to the calm blue skies framed by bare rafters and tufts of pink insulation where the living room had been. Miller said her family will remain in their home because looters could easily get in if they were to leave.

No injuries were attributed to the fierce Santa Ana condition that began late Friday night and continued into the early morning hours Sunday.

But an estimated 9,400 homes and businesses across the Southland remained without power Sunday afternoon, according to officials with Southern California Edison Co. and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. All but a few hundred customers were expected to be back in service by early this morning, they said.

At the peak of the wind storm, more than 275,000 homes or businesses were without power in a swath stretching from the Los Angeles-Ventura county line southeast through the San Gabriel Valley and into parts of Orange and San Bernardino counties, according to Southern California Edison spokesman David Barron.

Lines Slapped Together

Edison officials said the majority of the outages were caused by power lines slapping against each other, causing power losses that for the most part lasted only a few minutes. In most cases, normal operation returned automatically or was reactivated by a central circuit switch.

In all, more than 68,000 Edison customers in Orange County were affected by the wind storm, according to Fred Mickelson, Orange County operations manager for the utility company. He said about 4,000 of those were without electricity for several hours.

Mickelson said Sunday afternoon that crews of more than 120 workers, many of whom were called in from the Long Beach and South Bay areas, had been up since 2:30 a.m. Saturday repairing downed lines.

“We’re just going to work until we get it fixed,” Mickelson said. “It was pretty widespread throughout the county. But Santa Ana, Lemon Heights, Cowan Heights and Laguna Beach were particularly hard hit.”

Another 3,000 San Diego Gas & Electric Co. customers in the south Orange County communities of Laguna Niguel and San Juan Capistrano experienced “intermittent” power outages of a few seconds, a company spokeswoman said.

“There were some people whose lights flickered,” spokeswoman Elizabeth Abbott said. “That’s about it.”

Telephone Lines

Telephone lines proved slightly less vulnerable in the gale-force winds, with only scattered outages reported throughout Orange County.

In the City of Orange, where the worst storm damage was felt, Pacific Bell Co. crews were putting up cables in scattered neighborhoods.

On Myford Road in Irvine, service was knocked out primarily to some Irvine Co. telephones when an above-ground cable was knocked loose by the wind, Pacific Bell spokesman Steve Gould said.

In El Toro, the roots of a tree blown over by the winds knocked out service to about 25 customers in scattered areas. In Trabuco Canyon area, a small cable on a telephone pole was whipped loose, cutting off service to another 25 homes.

Only three General Telephone customers in Laguna Beach were reported without service early Sunday, according to company spokeswoman Linda Krengel. The three, reported to the utility company by Laguna police, were to be back in service Sunday night, Krengel said.

The blustery winds that tore off roofs, knocked down power lines and uprooted trees began to abate by dawn Sunday. Clear skies were forecast for today, with highs ranging from 67 to 75 degrees.

Continuing Winds

However, the National Weather Service predicted northeasterly winds gusting to 35 miles per hour would continue through midweek in mountain and canyon areas, occasionally dipping into coastal areas.

Most of the havoc wreaked by the gales fell into the nuisance category. But it was likely to keep insurance claims adjusters and lawyers busy for weeks, perhaps months, to come.

Charles Bernhardt of Irvine had already summoned his attorney to inspect the 45-foot section of his neighbor’s pine tree that had tumbled into his backyard, knocking a hole in his roof and ripping off shingles.

The tree will remain where it is for a few days, Bernhardt said, “until we straighten this thing out.”

For Ed and Kathy Folkers, it was a disappointing setback that would delay the March 2 completion of their home in the security-gated Trabuco Oaks community for at least a few months.

The Folkers have been living in their too-small mobile home since they bought the five-acre lot in January, 1982, and since then have been planning their dream house, with a panoramic view of rolling oak-studded hills of virtually all of southeastern Orange County.

Their house framer, Greg Clayton of San Clemente, pulled up Sunday in front of what remained of his handiwork near the end of Hamilton Trail, once a stagecoach route between San Diego and Los Angeles.

“A month down the drain,” Clayton said with a sigh. “This is just amazing . . . . I had two more days of framing left. Now we have to do it all over again, right from the ground up.”

At first, the carpenter told the Folkers: “No way would an open frame blow down in the wind,” when they telephoned early Saturday.

Seeing the roof peaks collapsed and huge two-by-four boards splintered in two, Clayton said, “The force of the wind must have set it rocking back and forth . . . . It must have resonated until the frame couldn’t handle it anymore.”

Clayton said the house superstructure was a “total loss,” and estimated damage at about $60,000.

“Maybe we can salvage some of it and build the kids a playhouse,” Kathy Folkers said.

Folkers, 43, a veterinarian who 10 years ago opened Mission Viejo’s first animal hospital, took the setback in stride. “There’s nothing we can do--except get started again.”

Although the doors were barred and her living room boarded off, debris remained piled in Melinda Miller’s living room Sunday, waiting for an insurance claims adjuster to inspect the damage.

The force of the wind knocked her double entry doors off their frame, sending them smashing up against a wall six feet away. An antique butter churn and her $1,500 china plate collection were destroyed, she said. Oddly, a valuable six-foot-tall grandfather clock survived the impact without a scratch. ‘Popped My Ears’

“We had just been out on the roof nailing down shingles,” Miller said. “The wind had started blowing too hard, so we had to stop. We came inside and were taking the plates down off the wall here in the entryway, then we heard this whooshing noise--you know, like the way it sounds when you’re in an airplane taking off.”

“I was upstairs, and it popped my ears,” said her seven-year-old daughter, Jamie.

Like the Folkers, Miller was philosophical about the disruption. “It’s done, what can you do?” she said. “I’m just thankful no one was hurt.”

“What a way to start off the New Year,” she said, shaking her head. “I guess I should look on the bright side--I’m getting all new furniture.”