COPING WITH THE STORM’S AFTERMATH : Residents Take Stock, Tidy Up After Tempest, Aid Neighbors : Victims of tornadoes, mudslides and fallen trees clean up and try to keep the damage from getting worse.

Maxine Richards sallied forth from her Seal Beach home Monday in search of towels and buckets to stanch the damage caused by day after day of pounding, unrelenting rain.

“My house is a mess,” said Richards, 66. “I’ve got leaks, floods, cracks, you name it.”

She walked into a Seal Beach Boulevard drugstore hoping to buy enough plastic buckets to cover the dozen leaks in her home. She walked out with only one bucket and two plastic salad bowls.

“That’s all I could find,” she said. “I guess these are popular items.”

Even as the county was buffeted Monday by two tornadoes, a Laguna Beach mudslide and the worst sewage spill ever, residents like Richards tried to stop damage from worsening or clean up the mess the storm had already left behind. With more rain falling, and more expected overnight, the equipment shortages could lead to days of arduous cleanup.

In Orange, Lu Pearson, owner of Pearson Hardware & Mower, reported a run on tarpaulins and gas-powered pumps. The pumps, which run from $30 to $110, are the type usually used for big jobs such as emptying a back-yard fish pond. The store had four or five of them, but sold out over the weekend, she said.

“One guy came in here and told me he had six inches of water in his sunken living room,” Pearson said. “He needed a pump, but we didn’t have any more to sell him.”

In Lake Forest, work crews with chain saws sliced up trees uprooted by Sunday’s tornado in the Lake Forest Keys subdivision.

When noon arrived, so did County Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez and city officials, offering residents assistance in their rebuilding efforts, especially by expediting the issuance of construction permits.

“The potential for greater damage was very, very high,” Vasquez said as he toured the storm-struck area. “We are fortunate in some respects that while there was damage, no one was injured in the movement of the tornado. In all my years of living in Orange County and being a police officer, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

One Lake Forest Keys resident hit hard was John Williams, a real estate broker and president of the Laguna Beach Board of Realtors.

Trees and flying debris, including a portion of his neighbor’s roof, struck Williams’ lakefront house on Superior Lane, damaging the inside, patio, deck and windows.

Williams said he had lived in the home about a year. By the time he dealt with neighbors who came to help, firefighters who came to inspect and reporters who came to see and question, it was 2 a.m. before he got to bed. Hours later, helicopters started flying by to survey the damage and reporters started calling all over again.

By early afternoon, Williams stood calmly, surveying his crushed patio and his yellow canoe, which he found several houses away.

“No one can say California real estate isn’t dynamic,” he joked as he waited for his insurance adjuster before heading off to work.

Elsewhere on Superior Lane, rain-soaked sawdust and pine needles covered the ground. Residents inspecting the damage far outnumbered repairmen trying to fix it.

Resident Jack Mahoney said that when he went outside Sunday night after 30 minutes of intense wind and rain, his house looked fine. But then he wondered: “Where’s my garage door?”

It turned out the aluminum door had imploded, pushing everything back several feet. The door “was crumpled like paper,” Mahoney said.

By Monday afternoon Mahoney had a new garage door, plus an estimate of $1,000 to $3,000 in damages to his roof, he said.

In Costa Mesa, the only signs of Saturday’s deluge at the Unity Villa Convalescent Hospital were dark stains on the linoleum and rags on the floor to soak up excess water.

During Saturday’s downpour, maintenance staff at the one-story, 120-bed facility were overwhelmed by the storm and called the Fire Department to help them pump out the water.

“They had quite a time,” said Mowry Keith, 70. “The whole place was flooded. I didn’t believe it.”

“It was touch and go, but we stayed,” said Bill Macy, 70. He sat in his wheelchair and pointed to some rags at the doorway, where water had seeped in.

Macy said at 2 p.m. Saturday about an eighth of an inch of water covered the hallways and the floors of rooms throughout the hospital, where about 60 people were staying. About 25 patients were moved from their rooms Saturday to dining areas, but none of the patients was forced out of the facility, according to hospital staff.

In Modjeska and Silverado canyons, county public works crews shoveled columns of mud and debris from roads.

“There are a lot of (landslides) all the way up and around” Modjeska Canyon and Modjeska Grade roads, said John Salinas, a county street maintenance worker.

Rain runoff from the Santa Ana mountains flowed unhindered across roads and over the banks of Santiago and Silverado creeks, which trace the floor of the canyons.

Only residents were allowed access to Silverado Canyon Road on Monday, while work crews and inmates from the County Jail cleaned muddy debris from smeared roads and sandbagged the bases of unstable hillsides.

In Modjeska Canyon, S.R. Smith, his wife and child, who live in a home at the bottom of a rocky cliff, must rely on a wooden pedestrian bridge to connect them to Modjeska Canyon Road and the rest of the world. The Santiago Creek, which once trickled under Smith’s driveway, has become a raging current.

Smith, 34, abandoned his bedroom, located in the back of the house nearest to the cliff, opting instead to sleep in the living room.

“I feel fortunate so far,” he said, standing in the driving rain Monday looking at the rocky face above his home. “That cliff is sure as hell saturated, but I have not had as much as a rock tumble down yet.”

While a landslide claimed the home of a resident in the area and toppled a tree in another neighbor’s front yard, Smith and many other Modjeska residents have avoided damage by helping each other.

“Everybody is doing it--loading sandbags in trucks and going around helping each other out,” he said. “But I would love to see blue skies again.”

MAIN STORY: A1

Times staff writers David Avila, Susan Christian, Marla Cone, Gregory Crouch, Lily Dizon, Catherine Gewertz, Len Hall, Scott Harris, Matt Lait, Mark Landsbaum, Phong Le, Dave Lesher, Mark Pinsky, Otto Strong, Jodi Wilgoren and Stacy Wong contributed to these reports, along with Times librarian Val Tkach and correspondents Debra Cano, Anna Cekola, Wilson Cummer, Bob Elston, Shelby Grad and Terry Spencer.

The Toll: Damage and Grief Around the County SEWAGE SPILLS Where and when: Doheny State Beach; Monday. Consequences: 2 million gallons of sewage flowed into Oso Creek near Mission Viejo; beach closed. Oso Creek flows into San Juan Creek, where about 8 million gallons of raw sewage is expected to empty into the ocean. Where and when: Aliso Creek in South Laguna; Monday. Consequences: Large puffs of detergent scudded along the sands like dirty meringue. TORNADOES Where and when: Huntington Beach; Monday, 12:15 p.m. Consequences: Carport roofs torn off at Huntington-by-the-Sea mobile home park; $9,300 in damages. Where and when: Lake Forest; Sunday, 6:45 p.m. Consequences: Wind throws woman 75 feet; roof torn off house; trees uprooted and about two dozen houses damaged. Where and when: Buena Park; Thursday, 1:40 a.m. Consequences: Residents awakened by thunderous roar of tornado that hopscotched over 110 homes; $200,000 in damage, uprooted trees, toppled motor homes and vehicles. SLIDING HOUSES Where and when: Laguna Beach; Monday, 4:30 a.m. Consequences: Family evacuated, their home destroyed when it slid about 50 feet downhill and burst into flames; two other homes destroyed in the sliding earth. MUDSLIDES Where and when: Anaheim Hills; Monday. Consequences: Residents of Rimwood Drive area evacuated from about 50 homes due to potential mudslide. Where and when: Modjeska Canyon; Saturday. Consequences: One home destroyed and residents of three others were evacuated. TRAFFIC FATALITY Where and when: Crystal Cove State Park; Saturday. Consequences: One man died after his car went out of control on a flooded stretch of Coast Highway south of Sand Canyon Avenue and struck another head-on. Why Streets Flood Due to record rainfall and inadequate storm drain systems, both city and county roadways are flooding. Always obey all barricades, don’t try to walk or drive through flooded areas, even if someone else has just driven through. The water can rise rapidly and is often deeper than it looks. On the street: Some streets lack drains. Some streets are designed to hold water until storm drains clear. Channels full: Some drainage channels have flaps to cover storm drain outlets. Water in storm drains cannot force open the flaps if the channel is too full of water. Clogged drains: Storm drains may be too small to handle a lot of rain in a short time, causing water to back up onto streets. Lack of pumping power: Pumps may not be able to move water fast enough from storm drains into drainage channels. How Potholes Form 1) Water under the road: Rain sinks through cracks in asphalt; water soaked up by mixture of rock, gravel and sand that supports the road. Labels: Water Asphalt road Crack Roadbed Soil 2) Roadbed erodes: Tires force water through the soggy roadbed, eroding parts of it. Labels: Car tire Roadbed Soil 3) Asphalt breaks: Asphalt sinks into eroded parts of roadbed, cracks under continued impact of tires. Labels: Pothole Roadbed Soil Pothole Hot Lines Anaheim: (714) 254-6840 Brea: (714 990-7691 Buena Park: (714) 562-3655 Costa Mesa: (714) 642-1721 Cypress: (714) 229-6760 Dana Point: (714) 567-6300 Fountain Valley: (714) 965-4493 Fullerton: (714) 738-6897 Garden Grove: (714) 741-5375 Huntington Beach: (714) 960-8861 Irvine: (714) 724-7600 Laguna Beach: (714) 497-0342 Laguna Niguel: (714) 362-4360 La Habra: (714) 905-9792 Lake Forest: (714) 567-6300 La Palma: (714) 523-1140 Los Alamitos: (310) 826-8670 Mission Viejo: (714) 348-2058 Newport Beach: (714) 644-3061 Orange: (714) 744-5530 Placentia: (714) 993-8245 San Clemente: (714) 361-8317 San Juan Capistrano: (714) 493-1171 Santa Ana: (714) 549-6820 Seal Beach: (310) 431-2527 Stanton: (714) 220-2220 Tustin: (714) 544-8890 Villa Park: (714) 998-1500 Westminster: (714) 898-3311 Yorba Linda: (714) 961-7170 Unincorporated areas: (714) 567-6300 Sources: County of Orange Emergency Operations Center; WeatherData Inc.; individual cities; California Highway Patrol; Orange County Storm Center Researched by DAVID REYES, JANICE L. JONES and APRIL JACKSON / Los Angeles Times