From Floods to Wildfires, Disasters Devastate O.C. : Retrospective: Rain and flames take turns as the area experiences some of the worst natural tragedies to date.

Mother Nature must be angry with someone in Orange County.

January and February brought floods of seemingly biblical proportion to the drought-drained region. As homes slid down hillsides and tumbling mud blocked roadways, Noah’s Ark seemed the only escape. October turned Laguna Beach into an inferno Dante would have admired. And just as the smoke cleared, the weather was wet again, threatening some of the same homes with a different curse. Then December dawned with more rain, sending mud slipping down well-worn slopes.

Even June, normally Orange County’s driest month, brought rain to shatter records: two inches fell that month, more than twice 1883’s record of .92 inches. 1993 will go down in history as the year of the natural disaster in Orange County. State and federal officials even declared a state of emergency here. Twice.

No community was hit harder than the seaside artists’ colony of Laguna Beach, ravaged by both fire and rain.

“This community is very special in terms of caring for people anyhow, but this gave us all an opportunity to really come forward and take care of each other,” said Lida Lenney, who was the city’s mayor until earlier this month. “It’s been a growth experience.”

October’s firestorm, by far the most devastating event, intensified community unity, as “I Laguna” buttons proliferated and volunteers by the hundreds came to the aid of victims. But it also sparked controversy at City Hall, as some residents criticized government officials for delaying construction of a reservoir they believed could have helped quash the flames.

Laguna Beach City Council members and water district officials have clashed over the specifics of the plan, so the reservoir’s fate remains unclear.

Staring at the ocean one recent morning, Lenney watched the waves and recalled a year marked by the forces of nature.

“Oh, how powerful the elements really are,” she said. “They really made us recognize again that we are really very small creatures in this universe.”

*

Two weeks of relentless rain kicked off 1993, causing about $60 million in damage to public and private property. January’s rainfall totaled 11.78 inches, nearly as much as the county’s all-time record of 11.83, set in 1969, and almost quadrupling the region’s monthly average.

During the storms:

* A landslide in Mission Viejo ruptured a large sewer line, triggering the county’s largest sewage spill since 1981.

* Tornadoes struck Buena Park and Lake Forest four days apart, hitting more than 100 homes, causing $200,000 in damage and tossing a woman 75 feet in the air.

* A 44-year-old Lakewood man drowned in Coyote Creek on the county’s northwestern border.

* A cyclone touched down in Huntington Beach, crumbling two carports in a mobile home park.

* Irvine Lake was full for the first time in 20 years.

* San Clemente’s overflowing channel flooded a hotel, restaurant and real-estate office.

* And six homes in San Clemente, three in Laguna Beach, three in Anaheim Hills and one in Modjeska Canyon were destroyed by sliding earth. Some 43 more homes in Anaheim Hills, 35 in San Clemente and several others in the canyon were damaged or threatened by the slides.

In Laguna, one custom home slipped off its foundation and crashed 50 feet down a steep ravine before bursting into flames Jan. 18. Two other million-dollar homes in the Mystic Hills neighborhood cracked and crumbled in the pre-dawn slide, with one family barely escaping through the window before their 6-year-old house slid 10 feet down the slope and buckled, accordion-style.

Fifty minor mudslides around Laguna Beach also closed roads and caused minor damage to various buildings.

“I’m stunned,” said Thomas Hitzel as he stood in the pounding rain under a broken umbrella that January day. Staring at his ocean-view home, now a garish caricature with the second floor crashed into the first, the deck fallen onto the garage, the driveway crumpled into concrete slabs and even the mailbox out of kilter, Hitzel shook his head: “We’re all stunned.”

Meanwhile, in an exclusive neighborhood in Anaheim Hills, the unrelenting downpour reactivated an ancient landslide, buckling curvy cliff-top streets in several places, twisting back yard swimming pools and cracking walls or foundations of a half-dozen homes. Residents had alerted city officials to the sliding earth six months before, and a city-hired engineering firm reported that the homes sit atop a landslide that dates back 15 million years and had recently begun to slip again. But no action had been taken to avert the slide.

Since the slide, Anaheim has spent about $4 million to pump water from the hillside. City officials have asked for federal help in funding a comprehensive underground study of the neighborhood and are considering forming an assessment district to help pay for continued monitoring of the area.

But about 250 residents have filed complaints against the city and the Metropolitan Water District, and seven families are suing the city, county and the water district for $7 million, claiming that a leaky pipe and other problems that fed the landslide could have been averted.

More rain dotted the sky throughout February, culminating in a massive landslide Feb. 22 that destroyed eight bluff-top homes in San Clemente, curtailed Amtrak commuter service and closed portions of Pacific Coast Highway for the rest of the year.

“It sounded like a cross between a bomb and an earthquake,” said a woman who lives in the slide area.

The slide buried 100 feet of railroad track under dirt and debris, disrupting service for nearly 5,000 commuters, whom Amtrak shuttled up and down the route on buses. Chunks of concrete and rock up to seven feet wide were among huge mounds of earth piled on a 300-foot stretch of Pacific Coast Highway in Dana Point.

After clearing the tracks, city officials simply put a fence around the debris and left the highway closed for months. In November, the state Coastal Commission passed a plan to fix the road at a cost of $2.8 million. The federal government will fund about 80% of that bill, with homeowners and the cities of Dana Point and San Clemente picking up the rest.

With the pelting rains, Southern Californians celebrated the end of a six-year drought, but local growers mourned a weak harvest.

The strawberry season was pushed back a month, and some growers reported losing as much as 60% of their crop; green bell peppers, leaf lettuce and celery sold at far higher prices than previous seasons because the produce was drenched and rotted by rain. Avocado harvesting was delayed but not decreased.

*

The seemingly endless rainfall, though, was nothing compared to the fire that raged eight months later. With Santa Ana winds fueling flames set by arsonists in three separate patches of Orange County brush, the blaze burned 40,000 acres, destroyed nearly 400 homes and caused almost $300 million in damage.

Though no one was killed, it was the worst fire in Orange County history.

Laguna Beach was at the eye of the inferno, with hundreds left homeless by a fire that began about noon Oct. 27 on the banks of Laguna Canyon Road.

Throughout the afternoon and overnight, the blaze hopscotched through the town, scorching Emerald Bay, an exclusive gated community; the El Morro Mobile Home Park; Canyon Acres, an eclectic artists’ colony; and the Mystic Hills neighborhood, where mudslides destroyed three homes earlier in the year. One of the city’s four schools also lost several classrooms in the fire.

Precious Laguna Canyon, which environmentalists fought for years to protect from development, was blackened, with thousands of acres of wilderness turned to ash and wildlife--including the endangered California gnatcatcher--threatened by the blaze.

Thousands of residents were evacuated, many spending the night at makeshift Red Cross shelters or in discount rooms at posh hotels such as the Ritz-Carlton and the Dana Point Resort. But some refused to leave, planting themselves on rooftops with garden hoses or sitting vigil, terrified, inside homes. Others snuck back into the city by boat or bicycle, desperate to save personal treasures before the fire reached their property.

They grabbed pets, pictures and papers. Then, in the days following the fire, they sifted through the ash their homes had become, some discovering rare prizes--a high school ring, diamond studs, an uncracked china teacup, a wedding band--beneath the rubble.

More than 1,000 firefighters fought the racing inferno, as Marine helicopters dipped 150-gallon buckets into the Pacific and dumped them on the town. But firetrucks were unable to get to some homes on hilly cul-de-sacs, and low water pressure hampered firefighters from extinguishing the blazes they did reach.

The Laguna blaze was not the season’s first. County residents awoke the morning of Oct. 27 to news of another fire, a 12-hour blaze that fanned across the hills of Villa Park and Orange.

That fire, which began when a teen-ager dropped a cigarette on dry brush in a hillside hangout, struck virtually the same neighborhood devastated 11 years before by another fire.

Begun in Anaheim Hills, the fire quickly swept down a hill at Santiago Oaks Regional Park and boldly entered the unincorporated Crest de Ville community of 47 homes. Two homes were destroyed, 29 more damaged. The flames brought a frightful sense of deja vu to many residents who had survived the 1982 Gypsum Canyon fire that ruined 12 homes and caused millions in damages in the same gated enclave.

An Anaheim teen-ager arrested Nov. 8 on suspicion of starting the north county fire told investigators he was “just screwing around.” The 17-year-old boy, whose name was withheld because of his age, was convicted of recklessly setting a fire and will be sentenced to as much as nine months in juvenile hall on Thursday.

Though it did not destroy as much property as its neighbor in Laguna Beach, the vast Ortega Highway fire was Orange County’s largest and longest of the year.

Stretching across 22,000 acres of the rural, eastern edge of the county, that fire destroyed 36 homes. It began about 4 p.m. Oct. 27 and lasted more than four days, spreading rapidly and gaining intensity in the early hours because fire fighting resources were committed elsewhere.

*

Before the smoke had really cleared, rains returned, threatening homes spared by the blaze that now perched precariously on fire-ravaged hillsides, especially vulnerable to mudslides. Within a week of the fire, the forecast had Laguna Beach residents girding for another disaster.

And then it came.

Sped by the scorched earth, the relatively light rain of Nov. 11 felt like a flash flood as it pounded homes, scooped up cars, closed major roadways and left a river of mud flowing through parts of Laguna. The pre-dawn torrent caused about $43,000 in damage to 13 homes; one family narrowly escaped death as the cold, black water rushed into their rented house, filling it near to the ceiling.

“It’s like this is a test and somebody’s saying, ‘OK, if you pass this test we’ll give you a harder one,’ ” Mayor Lenney said at the time, peering out her office window at mud-caked streets. “We’re really ready to say, ‘No more tests.’ ”

With the elements wreaking so much havoc so many times during the year, perhaps the most amazing thing about 1993 is that it passed without an earthquake in Orange County.

There are still five days left.

What’s Ahead in 1994

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