No Rest for the Bleary : Workers Throughout County Take Full Advantage of Sun’s Return

Lyle Swaney has a love-hate relationship with the rain. At the same time it supplies him with his livelihood, it bedevils his efforts.

Swaney is in charge of Ventura’s streets--and its potholes.

“Rain and other water is the No. 1 enemy of asphalt,” Swaney said. “The combination of water and traffic cause it to break up like pieces of candy. Unfortunately, with all the rain, we haven’t been able to do anything about it for the last couple of weeks.”

Swaney, a city superintendent of street maintenance, is one of many workers throughout Ventura County who are taking advantage of the break in the rainy weather to make up for lost time.

In Thousand Oaks, a firm that raises worms to eat compost piles has begun to dig through an avalanche of orders from customers. And, the schedules of roofers throughout the area have them scrambling up ladders to patch problems caused by the rains.

But some of the biggest pressure is focused on street maintenance workers, who have been deluged with pleas to fill tire-eating potholes.

In Oxnard on Wednesday, the regular crew of maintenance workers, which has been reduced through budget cuts to 13 people, drafted another eight city employees to wage its annual war on potholes.

“Every time it rains, the street breaks up and you get hundreds of new potholes,” said a beleaguered Fred Rodriguez, a public works supervisor in Oxnard.

Things are so busy in Ventura that Swaney has had to put off the pothole hot line’s promise of filling all holes within 48 hours.

“It’s just too crazy,” he said. “But we will get to all of them.”

Jeff Birdwell, a foreman at Ventura Roofing Co., said he feels overwrought by the demands of the rainy season.

“We’re overwhelmed,” he said. “What happens is that people wait until the last minute to do something about their old roofs. They put it off and put it off and then want you to perform miracles.”

Birdwell said the small company, which usually employs seven roofers but has recently hired eight more to meet demand, is re-roofing two houses, and has as many as 10 others on the waiting list.

“It’s usually not a busy season for tearing roofs off, but in a lot of cases, they are in such bad condition that you can’t patch them,” he said. “And people are desperate.”

The rains have given Steve Zoschke a big backlog of customers begging for his worms. The seemingly endless rains early this month prevented him from shipping parcels of earthworms to customers.

“We can’t do UPS because when it’s humid the worms will crawl out and be all over the truck,” said Zoschke, who works for the Worm Concern’s offices in Thousand Oaks.

By Wednesday, Zoschke and the Worm Concern were able to start mailing the worms to waiting gardeners and landscapers. But the rain left a larger problem at the Worm Concern’s 16-acre spread near Simi Valley.

Rains virtually shut down the site, where earthworms turn horse manure and yard clippings into rich fertilizer. Runoff also left the mud access roads virtually impassable, Zoschke said.

Although the humans stopped working, Zoschke said, the earthworms didn’t.

“They’re happy campers, but we’re not,” Zoschke said.

A return to sunny days has also helped businesses cash in on suspended sales.

At Golf N’ Stuff miniature golf course in Ventura on Wednesday, nearly 400 people decided to venture outside to play a round or two.

“When the sky cleared, the people flocked,” said Alvin Kelsch, the course’s manager. “People have been cooped up in the house for so long.”

Timothy Williams is a Times staff writer in Ventura and Doug McClellan is a Times correspondent in Thousand Oaks.