Ventura Flood Victims Dig Out : Storm: Death toll rises to six; six others are missing. Health officials close county beaches. Matilija Canyon residents are urged to evacuate.

As storm-battered Ventura County residents braced Thursday for more heavy rains this weekend, health officials closed all county beaches and motor home owners shoveled away mud left Wednesday when the rain-swollen Ventura river swept through their RV park.

The number of dead in Wednesday’s fierce storm rose to six as the body of 15-year-old Adam Bischoff of Woodland Hills was pulled from the Los Angeles River. Authorities also said heavy rains caused the death of a 63-year-old Brea woman who lost control of her car on a flooded Orange County road Wednesday night.

Other storm victims included a transient whose body was pulled from the Ventura River, a man killed in a traffic accident in Lebec, and a woman nine months pregnant and her fiance, suffocated by tons of mud that smashed through their bedroom in Foster Park.

Searches continued Thursday for at least six others, including Lance Cpl. Jeffrey B. Johns, 22, a crew member of a U.S. Marine helicopter that went down off the coast of Oxnard.

Teams also searched for a Ventura transient reported missing from his campsite in the Ventura River bed, two experienced skiers feared buried in an avalanche on Mt. Baldy and two men believed to have disappeared in the Los Angeles and Santa Ana rivers.

County emergency officials said it would be several days before they could estimate the dollar amount of property damage, but several Ventura County growers estimated that some farms suffered up to $1 million each in crop damage.

With forecasters calling for another storm to strike the Southland by Saturday, sheriff’s deputies recommended late Thursday that residents of about 30 houses in Matilija Canyon prepare to evacuate. Public works officials warned that rockfalls and mudslides could wipe out Matilija Road and isolate the community, as has happened previously in heavy storms.

The Los Angeles Unified School District canceled classes today for all 630,000 students as a “common sense precaution.” Officials in several Ventura County school districts said Friday that classes were scheduled as usual.

As much as two inches of rain could fall by Sunday, according to Steve Burback, a meteorologist for WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times. Light showers are expected again on Tuesday, but Burback said that would probably be the last gasp of one of the century’s worst storms in this area.

By contrast, storms since Friday have added six feet of water to the Lake Casitas reservoir. Five inches of rain fell in five hours early Wednesday in the mountains near Ojai, all of which dumped into the relatively narrow Ventura River.

The river swelled over its banks, washing away 10 to 15 motor homes and the campsites of scores of homeless people. Receding water filled trees in the dry riverbed with old mattresses, lumber, tarpaulins and food containers from the demolished campsites.

State officials agreed Thursday to extend full-time operation of the county’s main homeless shelter at the Oxnard armory for six weeks, until March 31.

Previously, the state shelter program opened National Guard armories between Feb. 15 and March 31 only when temperatures were lower than 40 degrees or there was a 50% chance of rain.

Earlier this month, the state Health and Welfare Agency had refused to keep shelters open every night, despite a grass-roots campaign that raised $40,000.

Meanwhile, the homeless surveyed the damage the floods had done to the tightknit riverbed community that outsiders call “Hobo Jungle.”

One transient said he went to the coroner’s office Thursday to identify the body of a riverbed resident pulled from the water the day before as that of Jim Butler, his roommate.

“I’ve been in the same bamboo building for the last nine months,” said Bernard Boulanger.

Boulanger said he returned to the riverbed after work Wednesday to find that their lean-to had been swept away in the storm. Butler was gone.

Another riverbed resident, Alan Mosher, 33, said he lost his small solar-powered trailer to the brutally swift surge.

“Now it’s all gone,” Mosher said, wandering aimlessly around the river bottom Thursday. “I have no idea what I’m going to do. I’m beyond the point of depression. I don’t believe this.”

But while several riverbed residents vowed to return home when the water subsided, they said they would not rush.

“I’m staying right here,” said Gary Hodge, one of 64 people who spent the night in the Red Cross shelter set up at DeAnza Middle School. “I don’t want to drown.”

By Thursday afternoon, the county Environmental Health Division ordered beaches near the Ventura River mouth closed as a thick, brown mixture of river silt, raw sewage and debris blended with the surf.

Runoff from sewage spills along the Arroyo Simi waterway also polluted the shore at the Point Mugu Lagoon, and officials warned county residents to stay away from creek and river water for at least three days after the rains end.

“You can’t see high bacterial counts” in the waterways and ocean, said Janice Harley, a county environmental health specialist. “Depending on how polluted they are, you could get . . . things like mild cases of diarrhea to dysentery (and) typhoid.”

State park officials also warned that rattlesnakes that were washed out of the high country were found among the debris in the delta, stunned but still quite dangerous.

“Don’t put your hands where you can’t see,” said Chief Ranger Jeff Price. “That’s my personal advice.”

Thursday morning, motor home owners slogged back to their trailers at the Ventura Beach RV Resort, now little more than a wide, mud-filled basin dotted with trees, debris and crippled vehicles.

They scraped mud off what few belongings they could retrieve and criticized park managers for warning them too late of the flooding river.

“Nobody said anything,” said Lynn Metcalf, whose trailer--the only home for him and his wife, Mary--was washed out to sea in the muddy, rushing flood.

Metcalf said the RV park staff seemed unworried late Tuesday night as heavy rains pushed the river’s edge closer to the park.

“They didn’t act like there was any danger,” Metcalf said, pulling waterlogged brush off his Camaro, which had been submerged. “They said there was nothing to get concerned about.”

Marilyn McDermott said that when she returned to her campsite, all she saw was “Mud, mud, mud,” which clung to the trailer’s floor and ruined her TV.

At that point, she decided to have the trailer towed from the park before she tried to salvage anything, she said.

“It’s an old trailer. I don’t know what it’s worth. We’ll wait and see.” McDermott was one of several refugees who received free lodging Wednesday night at the Harbortown Resort hotel in Ventura Harbor.

Nearby, tow trucks labored through foot-deep mud, their huge tires spinning as drivers sought traction to pull out some of the ruined campers.

Some residents slogged through the muck inside their campers, reclaiming clothes, photographs and other belongings that the mud had not touched.

Park employees walked across mud-slicked linoleum in the park’s convenience store to get provisions for the day, while a backhoe scraped silt from the parking lot.

The brown ooze was punctuated here and there by carp and crawdads that had perished when the water they lived in drained away and left them on the mud.

Although the Ventura Freeway was reopened a few hours after high waters stopped flowing across the road Wednesday, some freeways in Ventura County remained closed by the California Highway Patrol.

These closings were still in effect Thursday evening: California 126 between California 23 in Santa Paula and the Golden State Freeway in Santa Clarita; California 33 at Wheeler Gorge; the West Main Street off-ramp and on-ramp to northbound Ventura Freeway; the State Beaches off-ramp from the northbound Ventura Freeway and Guiberson Road near Fillmore.

The Southern Pacific rail line between Glendale and Santa Barbara also remained closed by mudslides and rain-weakened trestles, blocking hundreds of travelers and untold amounts of freight from traveling by train, railway officials said.

Amtrak chartered buses to transport ticket-holders between San Diego and Santa Barbara, then shut down the run until repairs can be made. Buses will continue to shuttle Amtrak passengers between Los Angeles and Seattle, said Amtrak spokesman Bruce Heard.

Elsewhere, a mudslide in June Mathews’ back yard in the Box Canyon area of Simi Valley almost washed away cages filled with 300 birds, said county Animal Control Director Kathy Jenks. A bird rehabilitation center in Tujunga agreed to take the birds until she could clean and repair the cages.

Jenks said the storms and floods of 1978 caused more damage to animal populations when a dam broke and drowned dozens of cattle.

Times staff writers Tina Daunt, Sherry Joe, Jesse Katz, Daryl Kelley, Collin Nash and Santiago O’Donnell and Times photographer Alan Hagman contributed to this report.

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