Open-and-Shut Case : Christo’s Umbrellas Are Furled Briefly Because of Wind, Then Bloom Anew

About 200 workers Monday scurried to temporarily crank down Christo’s 1,760 giant umbrellas in the Tejon Pass as a precaution against strong wind gusts.

The umbrellas were later opened as winds eased.

Weather forecasters “had told us that the big high winds predicted for Tuesday night were going to be Wednesday night, and then they say the big winds are not coming at all, so we take a gamble,” said Jeanne-Claude Christo-Javacheff, the artist’s wife.

“If we wait for there to be no wind, we might have to wait 10 years in California.”

About 1,000 of the umbrellas had closed when the artist decided to reopen them, she said--a task that workers were pursuing through the night and hoping to complete today.

“Some helicopter pilots told me we had gusts up to 60 miles per hour over the weekend in the mountains up here,” said Tom Golden, U.S. director of the artist’s “The Umbrellas: Joint Project for Japan and U.S.A.” The local segment of the project is located in a mountainous area along I-5, 60 miles north of Los Angeles.

About 100 of the yellow umbrellas--each as tall as a two-story house and weighing 488 pounds--were closed on Sunday morning because they were in high wind areas. The artist later decided that all should be protected, then ordered them re-opened.

Prototypes of open umbrellas were successfully wind tunnel tested at 65 m.p.h. during the design phase. But the New York-based artist, who says he will spend over $26 million on the project, did not want to test his creations to the limit.

“There is no use putting them under that much stress just to make a point,” Golden said. “He does not even like to have them open in more than 35 miles per hour wind. They just gyrate too much.”

Workers went from umbrella to umbrella along the 19-mile length of the artwork, cranking them down and enclosing them in heavy plastic bags.

The Christo people had already been caught once before with their umbrellas up at an inopportune time. Shortly after the bicontinental project was unveiled Oct. 9, three of the umbrellas in the Japan segment--which consists of 1,340 blue umbrellas in a farming area north of Tokyo--were toppled by wind gusts caused by a typhoon.

No one was hurt in the mishap. All the Japan umbrellas were closed and bagged for four days until the storm passed.

The local high winds are due to a combination of a major low-pressure system to the north, a trailing cold front and a mild low-pressure system off the Southern California coast, according to WeatherData, which provides forecasts to The Times.

The umbrellas--which are scheduled to be on display until Oct. 31 when they will start to be dismantled and the materials prepared for recycling--have attracted thousands of sightseers to the area, crowding I-5 and access roads. But the flow of visitors abated as soon as word got around that the umbrellas were being closed.

“There is just not a heck of a lot of traffic out there,” said Sgt. Jack Skaggs of the California Highway Patrol. “But there were still people out there taking pictures of each other in front of umbrellas, even though the umbrellas were down and just looked like big sticks out there.”