Storms Go On; New Aqueduct Damage Found

Torrential cloudbursts continued to hammer California’s deserts on Friday as officials reported additional damage to the flood-battered Los Angeles Aqueduct in the Owens Valley.

There were no new reports of major flooding from Friday’s thunderstorms, but Los Angeles Department of Water and Power officials called upon residents to employ water-conservation methods and warned that the new rains posed the threat of flooding that could prolong the already extended aqueduct repair schedule.

Concrete Walls Buckled

Inspection on Friday of the aqueduct--which supplies about 75% of Los Angeles’ water--revealed that the concrete walls along a 1,000-foot stretch of the open ditch in the Owens Valley about 180 miles north of Los Angeles had “cracked, buckled and popped” Thursday afternoon during the third day of thunderstorms there.

DWP crews had already been at work in the area, beginning the massive job of cleaning out an estimated 100,000 cubic yards of flood debris that buried two miles of the ditch on Tuesday night, when the new flash flood struck.

Dennis Williams, DWP engineer in charge of the aqueduct, said Thursday’s flooding exerted pressures outside the walls of the aqueduct that caused them to fail along a 1,000-foot stretch that either had not been buried or had already been mucked out.

He said about 80 of the 10-foot-by-14-foot concrete panels that make up the walls of the 31-foot-wide channel failed.

“We’ll have to continue cleaning out the debris and (at the same time) repair, and in many cases completely replace, those panels,” Williams said. “Our current estimate is that this will take about two weeks, working around the clock. But additional storms could cause additional damage or slow down the repairs.”

The DWP said that during the repair period, Los Angeles will continue to receive an adequate supply of water from down-channel reservoirs and through purchases from the Metropolitan Water District, which draws on other sources.

A major thunderstorm dropped about 3 inches of rain within three hours Friday night in the White Mountains east of Bishop, prompting a flash-flood warning for northeastern areas of the Owens Valley, but officials said the flooding was not expected in the vicinity of the aqueduct.

Most of Friday evening’s thunderstorm-caused rain was falling primarily farther south, in the Chocolate Mountains in Imperial County, in the Little San Bernardino Mountains in Riverside County, in the Coachella Valley cities of Palm Springs and Coachella and in the eastern Mojave Desert near Kramer Junction and Barstow in San Bernardino County.

Rick Dittmann, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times, said there would be “a few more” cloudbursts over the deserts again this afternoon and tonight, “but overall, the action should taper off during the next few days.”

Different This Year

It’s not unusual for summer thunderstorms to drench the deserts of the Southwest, but this year has been different.

Yuma, Ariz., a community across the Colorado River from Southern California’s Imperial County, was an example.

Two days after the most recent pair of back-to-back storms dumped heavy rain along both sides of the river in the Yuma area, city crews were working around the clock in steaming temperatures of up to 105 degrees to pump water out of flooded neighborhood streets.

Yuma residents assessed flood damage to 500 to 1,000 homes, most of which were unprotected by flood insurance.

“We’re not going to recover from these storms for a long, long time,” Yuma police spokesman Jan Schmidt said Friday. “We were totally under water.”

Richard Miller, city street division foreman, said his crews were “working 22 hours a day, getting two hours’ sleep. The heat, humidity and long hours are killing them.”

Many residents in this agricultural working-class community of 56,000 were salvaging what they could from waterlogged belongings, carting truckloads of ruined rugs, mattresses and couches to the city dump.

Some had very little left to retrieve.

Trying not to cry, Santiago Caballero said he saved for 10 years to buy a two-bedroom, $26,000 home that was virtually destroyed in the torrential rains that pounded Yuma on Wednesday.

“I’ve lost everything--my furniture, my clothes, my car,” said Caballero, a 63-year-old farm worker, currently unemployed.

“I have insurance, but it doesn’t cover flooding,” Caballero said. “If the house would have burned down, I would have been covered.”

Sand in Swimming Pool

On the other side of town, a shirtless Dennis McAlister stood with shovel in hand on a mound of sand that covered the $14,000 swimming pool he had built in his back yard in May.

Back in July, the first of the two storms had hit Yuma, dumping about 2.5 inches of rain, which is about the yearly average there. City work crews had bulldozed a 7-foot wall of sand to protect homes in the area from the flooding of a nearby canal.

Then, on Wednesday, as much as 5.25 more inches of rain pounded the city. The mound of sand collapsed in the torrential downpours and spilled over into McAlister’s yard.

McAlister said he had little time to worry about the swimming pool then.

“I was grabbing babies, dogs and clothes, just trying to get out of there,” he said.

McAlister is one of the lucky few who had flood insurance. But other problems remained.

“I guess we are going to have to build a sea wall on the west side of our property,” said McAlister, a 41-year-old high school football coach. “We are hoping the city of Yuma helps us with this.”

Making No Promises

But city officials were not making any promises Friday.

“We’re bound to get some claims in a situation like this, and we have every sympathy for these people,” said Dan Dorn, assistant to the city administrator. “But our No. 1 concern right now is to get the water level down in residential areas.”

Pumps were running around the clock but water was still standing as much as 2 feet deep in several streets and underpasses, although most homes were above the waterline by Friday afternoon.

Dorn said ruptured water and sewer mains had all been repaired, and service was restored throughout the city.

He said that inmates from a minimum-security state prison south of Yuma would be deployed today to help clean the city’s streets of sand and debris.

About 300 miles to the north, in the Mono County communities of Benton, Chalfant Valley and Hammil Valley, residents were digging out after two days of flash-flooding that left about 30 homes damaged and much of the area layered in mud.

Local California Department of Transportation Superintendent Loyd Hopper said Friday afternoon that as much as six feet of mud, sand and rock buried some stretches of U.S. 6, the two-lane highway that traverses the area.

Residents of Benton contributed food and blankets for a group of West German, Belgian and Dutch tourists who bedded down for the night in the town’s senior citizens’ center after their bus struck a rock hidden by floodwaters sweeping over the highway north of town and the vehicle’s transmission failed.

‘Nobody’s Complaining’

“Everybody’s taking it in stride and pulling together,” said Carol Olsen, who runs the Benton Station cafe in Benton. “We’re running low on hamburger buns, but so far, nobody’s complaining about getting their hamburgers on bread.”

A few miles south, in the Chalfant Valley, it didn’t rain, but the floodwaters washed south from Benton, where the cloudbursts fell.

Farmer Bud Orris, 61, said Friday that the flood spilled down the valley “like a minor tidal wave.”

“You could see the wall of water coming from miles away,” Orris said. “The first thing you see is the dust it kicks up in front of it. It takes it an hour or more to get here. . . . Last night, it was probably four feet deep in my son’s house.”

Orris said that in addition to the damaged homes, hundreds of acres of crops were lost.

Crops Ruined

“There’s some folks over there with a huge field of garlic just ready to pick and it’s all gone,” he told a reporter. “My brother-in-law at the end of the street has alfalfa all ready to cut and it’s all laying down flat now, covered in mud.”

Four miles west of Benton, 68-year-old Marjorie Sirucek told how the floodwaters “came in my back door and went out the front, leaving a ton of mud behind.”

She shook her head sadly as she surveyed the mud-soaked carpeting and furnishings in her stone house, built in the early 1900s.

“I can’t imagine the damages,” she said. “I feel like crying, but I can’t cry because I know I just couldn’t stop if I did. So you just gotta laugh.”

Jenifer Warren reported from the Owens Valley and Louis Sahagun from Yuma, Ariz. Times staff writer Eric Malnic in Los Angeles also contributed to this story.