Guests Flee as Waterline Atop Hotel Breaks : Flood: Scores of people at Westin South Coast Plaza are evacuated as torrent of water cascades 17 stories when pipe fails during test.

Scores of guests were evacuated Wednesday when a waterline atop the 17-story Westin South Coast Plaza hotel broke, sending water cascading through elevator shafts and stairways, and flooding a sunken lounge in the ground-floor lobby.

A hotel spokeswoman said workmen had been testing the water main at about 2:30 p.m. when the break occurred and hundreds of gallons escaped before they could shut it off.

As scores of disrupted guests milled on the sidewalk at the hotel’s entrance, Doug Gentry, a certified public accountant from Fresno, said he had been sitting in the lounge when a bartender and another guest saw the ceiling tiles begin to bulge and ooze water.

“Then they high-tailed it,” he said.

Firefighters tore open the lobby ceiling to allow water to drop into the lounge, rather than risk having it drip onto computers elsewhere on the ground floor, Fire Department Battalion Chief Jim Ellis said. The lounge filled with about three feet of water, which was pumped to the driveway outside.

Another evacuated guest, Kay McClelland, an actress performing at the nearby Orange County Performing Arts Center, said she was “really nervous about my animal in my room.” Hotel personnel finally rescued her cockatoo in its cage from McClelland’s eighth-floor room about half an hour after the accident.

Damage was believed to be restricted to the common areas of the hotel and not the guests’ rooms, Ellis said. An estimate of the damage was not available.

Westin offered guests accommodations in three neighboring hotels, but many people waited into the evening in the first-floor restaurant and lobby, if only to retrieve their belongings.

Hotel spokeswoman Bonnie Best said all guests were able to return to their rooms by 7 p.m.

Best said only a small percentage of the 250 to 300 guests at the hotel had to be evacuated, because the damage occurred in the afternoon and many of those staying at the Westin are on business trips to Orange County.

One business guest was Tom Mosgrove, 31, from San Francisco, who was in his 16th-floor room when he heard the waterline break on the roof above.

“It was like a big earthquake,” Mosgrove said. “There was a big vibration. The windows shook.”

Mosgrove left his room to evacuate and found “a couple engineering types sopping wet” in the stairwell at the east end of the building. The engineering types, whom he took to be hotel employees, told him to use the stairs on the west side, Mosgrove said.

One woman in a floral silk robe said she had been about to step into the shower when the public address system asked everyone to evacuate.

“The timing was wrong, that’s all,” she said, declining to give her name. She had grabbed only the robe and her purse, she said.

Actress McClelland, dressed in a bathing suit and a dress, and her colleagues said she was confident the trauma would not affect Wednesday night’s performance of “Crazy for You.”

“No one may have clean underwear, but the show will happen,” assured Diana Fairbanks, an associate manager with the company.

Times staff writer Zan Dubin contributed to this story.