Time for Talk, Cards While Village Awaits Road’s Repair : Weather: As crews worked to clear mud and rocks from Ortega Highway, El Cariso’s lifeline, another storm arrived.

Situated about 2,700 feet above sea level in the Cleveland National Forest, tiny El Cariso village has always been isolated, but never like this.

With Ortega Highway, the lifeline of this little community of 250, closed by mud and rock slides from last week’s storms, many of the residents have been busying themselves playing cards and gathering for idle conversation, said Carol Jillson, the owner of the El Cariso Country Store. And even as crews worked Monday night to try to open the highway, the first rain from yet another storm began falling on the little town.

Still, business at the Country Store has not been entirely dead, Jillson said. Caltrans crews, working on slides on both the east and west sides of the village, have replaced the usual tourists and commuters as customers, she said.

“There were so many workers around here, we did all right,” said Jillson, a former San Juan Capistrano resident who moved to the village 15 years ago. “They were cut off too, so they came here to shop.”

Although residents of the village with identification can pass through the Caltrans roadblocks before 7:30 a.m. and after 5 p.m., many aren’t bothering.

Locals here said the closure, which began Thursday night and is expected to continue at least through Wednesday, has been the longest since a fire in June, 1989, left them cut off from civilization, the nearest of which is Lake Elsinore, about 6 miles away, and San Juan Capistrano, 23 miles west. And it was that fire that gets the blame for the mud and rock slides that have isolated the community again.

“That fire precipitated the slides, no question about it,” said Walter Prill, 79, who moved to this Riverside County community 27 years ago from South Laguna. “The fire denudes the mountains and then, there you go, you’ve got a slide. I drove down to the slide yesterday and it was the most mud I’ve ever seen.”

On Monday night, light showers were reported through much of Southern California, with the brunt of the new storm expected today.

Steve Burback, meteorologist with WeatherData, said the large weather front, which is expected to clear out of the area by Wednesday afternoon, could dump up to 1 inch of rain along the coast and up to 5 inches in the mountains.

At 9:35 p.m., Orange County officials said Brea and Cypress were reporting 0.12 of an inch of rain, while Santa Ana and Huntington Beach reported rainfall at 0.08. Costa Mesa was reporting 0.04 of an inch of rain.

It was a very wide front, according to Burback, stretching from the Gulf of Alaska to south of the Hawaiian Islands. The storm will be accompanied by daytime temperatures in the mid-60s with overnight lows in the 50s.

This storm, Burback said, won’t produce as much moisture as the series of storms that pounded Southern California late last week. “But,” he said, “this one will be as big as any single storm that hit us last week.”

The torrential storms last week which dropped as much as 4 inches of rain around Orange County hit the town hard, knocking out all electricity from early in the morning until about 9:30 at night, Prill said.

“It came down in buckets for a while,” Prill said. “The rain clouds hit these mountains and the bottom drops out of them. And the wind was blowing so the rain hit you in the face, not on top of your head.”

Without electricity, residents stoked their fires in their homes or huddled with Jillson at the store, playing poker “but not doing any gambling,” she said.

“We had a whole day of it. It was really wild, with the winds and all and no electricity. I had my store open, and the whole neighborhood was here playing cards, until it got too dark to read my hand calculator.”

From the country store, many of the townspeople moved to the Lookout roadhouse overlooking Lake Elsinore, where they continued their card games, Jillson said.

Prill said the loss of electricity was inconvenient only “because of the war situation.” Otherwise, Prill, a retired manager for Southern California Gas Co., is prepared for such things.

“We have a wood stove, like most people up here, and we’ve already ordered five cords of wood for the year,” he said. “But we know sometimes these things are going to happen.”

Times staff writer George Frank contributed to this report.