Quiet Exit for Last S.D. Storm : Weather: Aside from swollen rivers and a small tornado, storm doesn’t live up to warnings.

Residents escaped with only minor flooding and rain-related damage Saturday--although there was a rare tornado, some road closures and a few rescues--as the last in a series of winter storms swept through the county.

Skies should be mostly blue by this afternoon, said Wilbur Shigehara, chief meteorologist for the National Weather Service here.

“There might be a few showers lingering Sunday morning but it should be a pretty decent day overall for San Diegans,” Shigehara said. In the Cuyamaca and Palomar mountain areas, up to a foot of snow will probably fall as a result of continued stormy weather over Saturday night, he said.

By 9 p.m. Saturday, Palomar Mountain Lodge already reported half a foot blanketing its wooded grounds.

Saturday’s storm prevented repair workers from making headway in their work to staunch the daily flow of 180 million gallons of treated sewage spewing from the broken underwater pipe off Point Loma that carries the region’s wastes out to sea.

County health officials are maintaining their quarantine against water contact along the coast from the San Diego River mouth south to the international border. A separate quarantine is also still in effect for most of Mission and San Diego bays.

The Mission Bay quarantine was strengthened after a sewer manhole overflowed Saturday afternoon at the intersection of Soledad Mountain Road and Garnet Avenue. It was spilling 350 gallons a minute Saturday night into nearby Rose Creek, which empties into Mission Bay, as city crews tried to get it under control.

While the storm brought its share of headaches Saturday, “there was nothing really critical, although we were geared up, just in case,” said Ralph Perry, duty officer for the county Office of Disaster Preparedness.

In San Onofre, a tornado touched down at a mobile home park for Marines on the northern edge of Camp Pendleton. It blew one home off its foundation, damaged several others and flattened numerous trees, Sgt. Nephi Limb said. There were no injuries from the rare twister, which forecasters attributed to the storm’s highly unstable air mass.

A torrent of mud from the north side of State Highway 94 cascaded onto westbound lanes, forcing drivers to negotiate the area between Federal Boulevard and Kelton Road by using the median strip, and causing a mile-long backup for several hours while Caltrans cleaned up the mess.

Caltrans emergency crews also closed State Highway 76 in Pauma Valley between Cole Grade Road and County Road S-6 until water receded from the low-lying area. San Diego city police closed parts of Fashion Valley Road in Mission Valley, a perennial collector of floodwaters after strong rains.

Felipe Luiz was rescued uninjured from the Tijuana River Saturday morning by the San Diego City River Rescue Squad after he and another migrant were trapped by high water while trying to cross the river into the United States from Mexico.

El Cajon police and fire paramedics plucked two male teen-ages from a fast-flowing drainage ditch near the Parkway Plaza Shopping Center Saturday afternoon after they lost control of their body boards while trying to navigate in a current of 35 m.p.h., police said. The two were rescued shaken but uninjured just before the ditch goes underneath Interstate 8.

Encinitas lifeguards using surfboards took three men off the top of their water-filled auto after they drove around road-closure barriers and tried to cross the often-flooded La Bajada dip between Encinitas and Rancho Santa Fe.

“The water was three-feet deep, more in some places, and running very swift, and their car was swept a ways downstream,” Capt. Gary Snavely of the Rancho Santa Fe Fire Department said.

A portion of the roof at the Levitz Furniture store in Chula Vista collapsed, sending ceiling panels and glass onto the floor. But 30 customers and employees escaped injury.

Minor flooding in Mission Beach, mostly along Mission Boulevard, actually came as a relief to many residents and police, who had feared more extensive damage because of predicted large Pacific waves coinciding with the morning high tides. There was only a moderate surf of 4 to 6 feet, with a few breakers at 8 feet, which should occur again this morning with the high tide.

“This was a faster moving storm than those” that slammed Southern California, and especially the Los Angeles area, with a vengeance last week, Shigehara said. “If it rains long enough in one spot, it floods.

“This time we got the best of both worlds: We got needed rain, but the rain quit just when it would have really started to cause problems.”

As of 9 p.m., 0.58 inch had fallen at weather service headquarters at Lindbergh Field, bringing the season total to 8.17 inches. That’s about 2 inches more than the 5.99 inches normal so far for the July 1-June 30 measuring season.

Last year at this time, the city had recorded only 2.31 inches, although the 1991 “March miracle” deluge later brought the figure past normal levels.

Around the county, Fallbrook and the San Diego Wild Animal Park each recorded 1.10 inches as of 4 p.m., the daily reporting time for outlying stations. Miramar had 1.01 inches, Oceanside 0.56, Del Mar 0.74, Escondido 0.93, El Cajon 0.65 and Imperial Beach 0.64 inches.

Snow began falling about 3 p.m. in both the Palomar and Laguna mountains, and Palomar General Store employee Francisco Valdovinos called the sight “nice and quiet, with big snowflakes, everything white and beautiful.”

Shigehara forecast decreasing cloudiness today with sunny weather on Monday and slowly warming temperatures.

“This is the last of the big storms for a while,” he said. “We will be drying out as future storms move more across the northern part of the state on Tuesday or Wednesday. We probably will just see some clouding up here from those storms.”

That will be welcome news to the crews on board a repair barge anchored offshore where the breaks occurred two weeks ago in the big steel pipe taking treated sewage out to sea. The crew rode out storm waves Saturday, but were unable to do any work due to the rough waters, Deputy City Manager Roger Frauenfelder said Saturday.

The pipe is broken in several places and effluent is now spewing into the ocean only 3,150 feet from the coast, in water 35 feet deep instead of the 220-foot depth at the pipe’s end point 2.2 miles from shore.

Frauenfelder said that the workers hope to place more ballast around the unbroken sections of the pipe today to stabilize it before beginning two months of repairs on the damaged portions.

In the meantime, county health department spokeswoman Ruth Covill said that quarantines remain in effect.

Results from measurements taken on Friday show bacterial counts at 56,000 coliform per 100 milliliters of water at the spill site, Covill said Saturday. The legal health limit is 1,000 coliform per 100 milliliters of water. At Cabrillo National Monument just south of the spill site, the reading was 1,600. At the foot of Ladera Street in Point Loma, a popular surfing spot about 2 miles from the spill, readings on Friday were at 500.

But the law requires three consecutive days of legal readings before lifting a quarantine in any given area, Covill said. (Readings taken on any given day are counted one day later after technicians have counted the bacteria growing in the water.)

The size of the quarantine area could also change depending on ocean currents, she said.

The Silver Strand along Coronado and Imperial Beach areas are also quarantined because of contaminated runoff resulting from rain waters carrying raw sewage from the Tijuana River, an estimated 12 million gallons a day.

The San Diego Bay quarantine, which extends from the tip of Point Loma into the bay as far south as 28th Street in National City, may be due to both storm runoffs and the broken pipe, Covill said. “All we know is that it is polluted,” she said.

Similarly, almost all of Mission Bay remains under quarantine, she said, and the latest spill from the overloaded manhole cover will continue the ban for at least several more days.