Flooding, Slides Plague Soggy County : Storm: Most areas get several inches of rain, bringing season totals above normal. Homes and businesses are deluged. There’s no end in sight to the rain, a forecaster says.

A heavy rainstorm bombarded most of the county with nearly three inches of rain in eight hours Monday, flooding homes, farms and streets, littering freeways with careening cars and triggering mudslides.

Some of the heaviest flooding was in Thousand Oaks, where clogged storm drains forced residents and city workers to sandbag homes. The city received more than 300 calls for help.

“I’ve never seen so much water in such a short period of time before,” said Joseph Bravo, a supervisor in the Thousand Oaks Public Works Department.

The storm, coming on the heels of heavy rain that pelted the county on Sunday, also hit hard in areas of Oxnard and Camarillo, turning Calleguas Creek into a raging stream that overflowed its banks south of the Ventura Freeway and flooded a nearby vegetable farm.

The California Department of Transportation called in a crane and work crews Monday night to clear out the channel in an emergency effort to stop the flooding.

The storm brought rainfall totals above normal levels for the time of year. In Camarillo, the season’s rainfall by Monday night had reached 11.36 inches, compared to a normal to-date total of 8.11. Simi Valley had gotten 12.21 inches by Monday night; its normal total to date is 8.46 inches.

The storm also flooded the office and parking lot of a major produce shipper in Oxnard, forcing workers to use canoes to get from their office to the outdoor loading area.

“It’s a mess out there,” said David Servaes, region manager for Caltrans. “We’ve got flooding everywhere.”

Servaes said rain-swollen earth on an eroded hillside 15 miles north of Ojai had oozed onto California 33 Monday afternoon, causing a mudslide “bigger than a house.’

The slide closed the highway above Wheeler Gorge. Pacific Coast Highway was also littered with rocks and mud, Servaes said. In addition, Las Posas Road in Camarillo and Lewis Road near the Camarillo State Hospital were closed due to flooding, as was Central Avenue just west of Camarillo.

The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department said it was receiving a “report of an accident every five minutes,” and the California Highway Patrol reported 35 accidents between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday. But no serious injuries were reported.

In the hard-hit east county, Thousand Oaks had received 4.14 inches of rain, Moorpark 3.75 inches and Simi Valley 3.77 inches since 8 a.m. Sunday. Camarillo and Ventura also reported more than four inches during the two days, most of that on Monday.

The wet weather, which began last Wednesday and has left up to 10 inches of rain in parts of the county, is expected to continue at least through the end of the week.

At least two more storm fronts are expected to follow in the next few days, each carrying as much as two to four inches of rain, said Terry Schaeffer, National Weather Service meteorologist.

“If we get 20 more inches of rain, we can call this drought dead,” Schaeffer said of the six-year drought that has left the state’s reservoirs and ground-water tables severely depleted.

Schaeffer said the high-pressure weather systems off the coast that deflected storms during past years are absent now.

“We have a straight shot of storms coming right out of Northern China. It’s the Szechwan connection,” he said. He said that he could not see the end of the rainy pattern and that heavy rains last March may have been the “beginning of the end of the drought.”

The storm filled the county’s frequently dry riverbeds, sending water cascading down the Ventura and Santa Clara river valleys toward the sea.

But the rivers and the Sespe Creek, considered the largest storm channels in the county, were still at only one-third of capacity and were not threatening to overtop their banks, said Dolores Taylor, county hydrologist and engineer.

“But this is pretty good intensity,” she said. “It’s starting to make me a little nervous.”

The storms swelled creeks in the northern half of the county, allowing more than 2,000-acre feet of water to drain into the county’s largest reservoir at Lake Casitas.

That is nearly one-tenth of the total annual water needs for the 55,000 residents who receive water from the Casitas Municipal Water District, said John Johnson, district manager.

At the eastern end of the county, the storm increased storage at Lake Piru by about 6,000 acre-feet, said James T. Gross, ground-water resources manager at United Water Conservation District.

Gross said the district’s Freeman Diversion Dam at Saticoy had captured and diverted 3,000 acre-feet since Wednesday.

But Gross estimated that another 6,000 acre-feet of water is flowing over the top of the dam every day that it continues to rain. The district is in the early stages of applying for permission to double the capacity of the dam, he said.

The storms were a mixed blessing for Ventura County farmers, said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. The rain has provided a healthy soaking to clean out unwanted minerals from the root zones of citrus and avocado trees, he said.

But it can also drown some crops and causes mold and fungus on strawberries, muddies up vegetable crops and keeps workers from entering the fields to harvest flowers at one of the busiest times of the year for flower growers.

“One parsley grower said his crop was just coming up and this rain was just pounding it back into the ground,” Laird said. “It’s always true in agriculture that when someone gets a real benefit, someone else gets hammered.”

Laird said it is too early to tell how much damage will come out of the storms.

The rain also caused brief power outages for more than 3,000 homes and businesses throughout the county. By today, the storm was expected to whip the seas into five- to 10-foot swells, prompting the county Sheriff’s Department to warn beachfront residents.

The storm trapped one flower vendor early Monday when the water level rose to about a foot in her Camarillo shop. Amy Than said she went into her shop at 9 a.m. Monday to order flowers from Chicago. When the water in the shop began to rise, she called the Fire Department, the building owner and anyone she could think of for help.

By noon, she was still sitting on the same chair, waiting for the Fire Department pumps to remove the remaining eight inches of water from the floor.

“I’m hungry and I want to go to the bathroom,” she said, shouting over the loud hum of the pump. “I don’t have any boots, so that’s why I just sit on this chair and wait.”

Staff writers Sherry Joe and Ron Soble and correspondents Larry Speer and Christopher Pummer contributed to this story.

SOUTHLAND WEATHER: A1