Workers Struggling to Plug Collapsed Levee : 20,000 Homeless as Floodwaters Continue to Flow Into Two Farm Towns on Yuba River

Floodwaters from a collapsed levee on the Yuba River continued to spread over two farm towns Friday, inundatingbuildings up to their rooftops and leaving up to 20,000 people homeless.

More than a dozen Red Cross shelters were set up at Beale Air Force Base and adjacent areas to feed and shelter an estimated 10,000 of the homeless fleeing from the inundated farm communities of Linda and Olivehurst, near Marysville, 50 miles north of Sacramento.

Construction crews, working from a seemingly endless line of rock-laden dump trucks, struggled to plug a gaping 150-foot-long hole punched through the earthen river levee Thursday night by storm-swollen waters cascading from the nearby snow-capped Sierra.

Deukmejian Tours Area

Gov. George Deukmejian, who toured the devastation by National Guard helicopter and spoke with several refugees at Beale Air Force Base, said he hoped the levee could be repaired by Friday night. But other state officials said the massive patching job could take another day.

“It looked like a mini-ocean flying up here from Sacramento,” the governor told reporters. “It’s a very tragic sight. It surprised me it’s as bad as it is.”

Although no deaths were reported, about 50 of the evacuees were injured, according to Bill Medigovich, director of the state Office of Emergency Services. A team of divers swam from one home to another, looking for people who might not have escaped ahead of the rapidly rising waters. “We feel confident we’ve gotten everyone out,” Medigovich said.

The levee ruptured so quickly that thousands of people had only a few minutes to run for their lives. Customers had to be picked up by helicopter off the roof of the Peach Tree Shopping Center. Hundreds of cars, already up to their fenders in water, were left stranded and ultimately submerged. Pets and livestock had to fend for themselves. Laundry was left on clotheslines.

“I was cooking dinner and heard a helicopter coming real close and slow and it said, ‘Please evacuate. The water’s coming,’ ” recalled Betty Jones, 31, of Linda. “I just turned off the oven, shut off all the lights, got my two sons and my mother and started walking fast down the road and flagged a pickup truck. Hey, honey, I’m just glad me and the kids made it out of there.”

In terms of people evacuated, this was the biggest of the many flood disasters that have struck California since torrential rains began Feb. 12. Northern California skies were mostly clear Friday, although there were some scattered showers.

11 Storm-Related Deaths

In all, there have been at least 11 deaths due to drownings, mud slides and one storm-triggered heart attack in the California floods. Damage, not counting the latest devastation here, has been estimated at $280 million.

There was no preliminary damage estimate for the Linda-Olivehurst region, but hundreds of homes and several businesses were inundated.

State and federal officials, meanwhile, kept a close watch over the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the fragile funnel for all rivers flowing through California’s 500-mile-long Central Valley.

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Deukmejian said after flying by helicopter from Linda to Webb Tract, an island near Rio Vista about midway between Sacramento and San Francisco.

Deukmejian gave a pep talk to members of the California Conservation Corps who were piling sandbags to shore up a levee along the San Joaquin River.

By Friday, the floods had submerged five delta islands and inundated more than 200 homes in the town of Thornton, just off Interstate 5.

Around Lake Tahoe, in California and Nevada, an estimated 80,000 residents went without natural gas as temperatures dipped into the mid-20s. Gas supplies were cut off Wednesday when a pipeline supplying rural towns in western Nevada and the Lake Tahoe basin burst in a storm-related incident.

Russian River Recedes

In Sonoma and Napa counties, flood victims continued returning to their homes. Guerneville, on the banks of the Russian River, had suffered some of the week’s worst flooding. But by Friday the river had receded to four feet below flood level. Only 375 people remained in shelters in Santa Rosa, where thousands had been housed days earlier.

Alan Johnson, president of the Golden Gate Red Cross chapter, estimated it will cost at least $5 million to provide makeshift shelter and food for California’s storm victims.

There were births as well as deaths in the floods.

Two babies were born to evacuated mothers Friday at the Beale Air Force Base hospital. Carol Wilson, 23, of Linda said her labor pains began when she got into an argument over the telephone with a relative who refused to leave home despite the rising waters.

But while there were a few moments of joy, many tears also were shed as evacuees studied news photos of muddy waters covering their homes.

A sobbing Stacey Swiger, 27, mother of a 9-year-old son who suffers from cerebral palsy, pointed to a picture and said, “That’s where my house was. We don’t have anywhere to live now. There are so many memories that were lost, 10 years of a life all gone.” She fled her house so fast that she did not have time even to take her son’s wheelchair.

But some people refused to be evacuated. Describing himself as a “survivalist,” Barry Rains, 29, a steel fabricator, holed up in his attic all night as floodwaters lapped into his living room. “I’m ready. I have ample food. It’s life, man,” Rains said, a can of beer in his hand.

For many old-timers here, the levee break brought to mind another devastating flood 30 years ago. On Christmas Eve, 1955, the Feather River burst its banks twice within hours, sending a 10-foot wall of water into nearby Yuba City, killing 64 people and leaving 35,000 homeless.

Dams to Hold Back Waters

Since then, several major dams, including mammoth Oroville, have been built to hold back floodwaters in the Sierra foothills. But many flood victims on Friday complained that these structures have provided government officials with a false sense of confidence.

In the six days leading up to the levee collapse, 44 inches of rain had fallen in the watershed that feeds the Yuba and Feather rivers, straining flood control systems as they had never been before. But government officials acknowledged on Friday that their attention mainly was concentrated on the American and Sacramento rivers around the state’s capital and on the delicate delta levee system. The last place that they expected a levee to collapse, they said, was in the Marysville-Yuba City area.

Deukmejian told reporters that a government worker patrolling the levees had just walked along the top of the Yuba River levee shortly before it crumbled and had seen nothing to worry about.

Once the break occurred, it took government officials about three hours to assemble and draw up plans for plugging the gap, according to Alex Cunningham, deputy director of the state Water Resources Department. It took another two hours for the officials to complete all the paper work that was necessary, they said, to begin the repairs.

Governor Hears Complaint

One angry woman, Nadine Graham, complained loudly to the governor about this as he walked through a refugee center at Beale Air Force Base.

“Why didn’t they work on that levee when it (the hole) was 35 feet wide?” she lectured. “They waited to get the cheapest price instead of putting anything in there to keep that from widening. Now, everything is gone.”

Answering for Deukmejian, Cunningham said the government had legal requirements to meet despite the emergency situation.

“Once something like that (levee) goes,” he added, “there is nothing you can do to stop it because the volume of water is so great that it just erodes the levee. People just think, ‘God, it broke. Why didn’t you fix it in 10 minutes?’ Believe me, if there was a way we could have done it, we would have done it.”

By Friday afternoon, the floodwaters were covering roughly 60 square miles of mostly flat farmland. Although the Yuba River was receding, the floodwaters spilling from it continued to spread and rise. Officials said it could be three or four days before residents can return to what is left of their homes.

Meanwhile, Deukmejian announced that President Reagan and the Federal Emergency Management Agency had approved his request for federal disaster assistance for nine Northern California counties: Lake, Marin, Napa, Sacramento, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano, Sonoma and Yuba.

The federal assistance, he said, could include temporary housing, low-interest loans, individual and family grants, business and farm loans and tax deductions.

The governor also Friday asked Reagan for federal assistance for 17 additional counties: Alpine, Amador, Butte, Calaveras, Colusa, El Dorado, Lassen, Mendocino, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, San Joaquin, Sierra, Sutter, Tehama, Tuolume and Yolo.

Times staff writers Mark Gladstone in Marysville, Jerry Gillam and Carl Ingram in Sacramento, Richard C. Paddock in the Sacramento River Delta, George Skelton in Linda and Ruth Snyder in San Francisco also contributed to this story.