Water Pipe Break Floods Streets and Shakes Buildings : Sherman Oaks: A gush of about 300,000 gallons from a main rupture submerges cars during rush hour.

A huge water main burst under Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks at rush hour Friday, blasting a geyser through the pavement and sending an instant river coursing along the thoroughfare and into some stores.

“We felt ground moving underneath us and all of a sudden I see a spurt of water like a fire hydrant broke,” said short-order cook Stephen King, who was working on a burger when the pavement exploded about 20 feet from Mel’s Drive-in Diner at Kester Avenue and Ventura Boulevard.

“It was insane,” he said. “We could see a few people walking and the water went up to their waists.”

Between 300,000 and 400,000 gallons of fresh water gushed from the broken pipe, a five-foot wide main connecting the Los Angeles Reservoir Complex in Sylmar with the Stone Canyon and Franklin Canyon reservoirs above Bel-Air and Beverly Hills. The pipe was pumping 600 gallons of water per second at high pressure when the rupture occurred about 4:30 p.m., Los Angeles Department of Water and Power spokesman Ed Freudenburg said.

The flow of water from the break was stopped by 8 p.m.

There were no injuries and most of the damage appeared limited to the buckled pavement, Los Angeles Fire Department officials said. Firefighters were mopping soaked carpets in businesses along the boulevard, and an inspection was underway to determine if any buildings received structural damage, Assistant Fire Chief Jim O’Neill said.

No such damage had been found Friday night, he said.

The rupture created a 20-foot wide hole in the eastbound lanes of Ventura Boulevard. Rush-hour traffic came to a standstill as police closed a four-block stretch of the busy boulevard and portions of Kester Avenue and Van Nuys Boulevard.

Officials at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said they did not know what caused the break in the pipe. The pipe, running south over the Santa Monica Mountains, broke near an area where it intersects a second, 30-inch pipe running in an east-west direction, Freudenburg said.

The rupture did not affect water customers because the line runs between reservoirs and is not connected to customers, Freudenburg said.

Several people who were in the area said the rupture felt like an earthquake. The break was followed by a three-foot high wall of water that cascaded over expensive autos as it flowed east toward Van Nuys Boulevard along a stretch of Ventura Boulevard--dotted with fashionable shops and cafes--sometimes called the “Melrose of the Valley.”

“There’s Porsches, beautiful Porsches, submerged in water!” moaned Diana Jaffe, bar manager at Le Cafe. James Kroning, a waiter at the restaurant who had just arrived for work, said he saw a Volkswagen bug slowly pushed along the street by the force of the water.

Others said motorists tried to get out of the area by following the raised center of the street, where the water was shallowest, but to no avail. A convoy of tow trucks was busy towing stalled autos into the evening Friday.

“At one point there was a line of cars just dead center in the middle of the street,” said Andrew Heyl, manager of The Sharper Image store on Ventura Boulevard.

Witnesses said the sight of the pavement appearing to buckle spontaneously, just before the water burst through, reminded them of a science-fiction movie.

King of Mel’s diner said the road started buckling just as a Cadillac passed. “It rose up about three feet,” he said. “About 20 seconds later, a 15-foot spray started spraying out like it was a major flood and then the ground just started cracking up.”

Large chunks of pavement were washed several hundred feet down the street. Water also damaged several cars parked in underground garages along Willis Avenue, Los Angeles police said.

At Equinox Jewelry on the south side of the boulevard, some water seeped through the entrance but manager Vahe Berejiklian said he managed to stem the flow by placing paper towels under the door. When he stepped outside, he noticed water flowing toward him.

“In a matter of a minute, not even a minute, it was like a river,” he said. “It was like a dam broke and the water suddenly started flowing.”

Sean Shahinian, a salesman at Paul Jardin menswear, estimated damage to his store’s designer merchandise at about $2,000. Inside, two firefighters pumped up water and dumped sand behind the front door to seal it from the inside.

Freudenburg said crews would work through the night to repair the pipe, a task he expected to be completed by today.

The road was expected to remain closed for repairs until Sunday, he said.

Times staff writers Jack Cheevers and Mike Connelly contributed to this story.