Fearing Storms, County Cancels Cloud-Seeding : Drought: Officials say suspending the rest of the $400-a-day contract for February is not related to recent criticism of the expenditure.

As rain pounded Los Angeles Tuesday, county officials considered resuming their cloud-seeding program to try to increase the snowpack in the San Gabriel Mountains.

But by midafternoon, afraid they might increase an already strong storm front, the officials opted to cancel the rest of this month’s seeding contract.

The Times reported last week that the county was paying a Utah firm $400 a day to remain on call during this wet winter, leading county supervisors to question the wisdom of the expenditure.

Public works officials said the five-day suspension of the contract--a $2,000 savings--was unrelated to the criticism.

“This is the first time we’ve invoked that part of the contract, but we’ve always said we would if the condition was not right” for seeding, said James A. Noyes, deputy director of the county’s Department of Public Works.

Under intense questioning by the Board of Supervisors earlier in the day, public works Director Thomas A. Tidemanson also agreed to re-evaluate whether a continuous seeding contract makes sense in a year when water is regularly being released from reservoirs into the ocean.

“Why do we have a contract for someone to stand by instead of just hiring them as we need them?” asked Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke.

Employing a cloud-seeding company based closer to Los Angeles, Burke suggested, might allow the county to pay only when rainmaking conditions were optimal.

Tidemanson said the $181,460 six-month contract with the Salt Lake City firm, North American Weather Consultants, was the lowest of only two bids the county received last year after sending inquiries to five firms. The higher bid was from a company in Fresno.

“There just are not that many companies that do this kind of work,” Noyes said.

More than half of the fee pays for fixed costs, such as machinery. Tidemanson said that without the $400 daily retainer fee--which one supervisor described as “a health insurance policy”--North American “wouldn’t be available” when needed.

Under the seeding contract’s provisions, the county can cancel the remainder of a month’s service at any time and save the daily fee. However, Tidemanson said there had been no cancellations this year because the county wanted to be prepared to seed whenever storms did not live up to their forecasts.

The last time clouds were seeded with silver iodide crystals was Jan. 2, according to a report given to supervisors before Tuesday’s meeting. Earlier seedings occurred during storms that passed through on Dec. 6 and Dec. 29. Last year, clouds were seeded 16 times, Tidemanson said, creating at least 12,750 acre-feet of water, worth at least $3 million.

Defending the practice of continuing the seeding contract even while water is being released from county reservoirs, Tidemanson explained that releases take place after every major storm to make room for future rainfall. Then, if the next storm does not seem likely to fill the reservoirs again, seeding is considered.

“You’re playing a guessing game with Mother Nature all the time,” he said. “We’re constantly either conserving water or letting it out.”

So far this year most of the smaller storms have been too warm to accommodate the chemical reaction necessary for seeding to work well, he said.

However, the Arctic storm system that began moving through Los Angeles on Tuesday was colder, leaving snow-making a possibility. Snow in the mountains is a passive storage system, replenishing reservoirs and spreading grounds in the spring when they are less likely to be full.

Supervisor Ed Edelman said he was concerned that any additional rain created by seeding could flood urban areas of the county. Tidemanson responded that seeding is only used when winds are blowing away from urban areas and that it is halted when the wind shifts toward those directions.

But, he added, “There are absolutely no guarantees.”

Edelman asked Tidemanson to report back to the board on precisely how weather conditions are monitored.

The county discontinued its rainmaking program in 1978, when severe flooding in Big Tujunga Canyon followed cloud-seeding by a day, causing 11 deaths and $43 million in damage.

Dozens of lawsuits were filed against the county, although none were successful because no direct link could be proven between the seeding and the storm’s force.

Faced with a lingering drought, the county resumed its seeding program in April, 1991.