Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Post-Quake Traffic Routes Take a Beating : Transportation: Roads that withstood the shaking are now being battered by caravans of diverted commuters and rains.

Surface streets that withstood the initial battering of the Northridge earthquake are now taking a daily pounding from overflowing traffic diverted from crumbled freeways.

Long lines of cars and trucks are traveling on roads unprepared to handle such weight and volume, according to Santa Clarita city officials and traffic engineers.

“We’ve already seen the damage along Lyons Avenue when traffic is diverted off of I-5,” said Gail Foy, the city’s public information officer, noting one of several streets showing the strain of post-quake traffic.

Santa Clarita has tallied $6.8 million in damages to its roads so far, and officials expect the figure to climb as more complete repair estimates come in.

Adding to the damages are the recent rains that have soaked city streets.

“The rains don’t help,” Foy said. “The trucks come by and weaken the street, then the rains come and weaken them even more.”

The following Santa Clarita thoroughfares have borne the brunt of the traffic rerouted since the Northridge earthquake:

* Sierra Highway. When debris from the earthquake still blocked the Golden State Freeway, this street parallel to the Antelope Valley Freeway was the only southern route for commuters from the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys. All four lanes were temporarily designated for southbound travel in the mornings.

Traffic now runs in both directions again, but an additional lane has been striped to improve the commute.

* San Fernando Road. As one of the two primary roads that feed onto Sierra Highway and a designated truck route, this was the first street in the center of the city to be packed with cars following the quake.

A left-hand turn lane is to be installed this week for northbound traffic turning onto Lyons Avenue that should help evening driving, said Bahman Janka, a city traffic engineer.

* Soledad Canyon Road/Valencia Boulevard. Santa Clarita’s only major east-west thoroughfare, it often crawls bumper-to-bumper during peak times, but blockage of the Golden State and Antelope Valley interchange has sent hundreds more drivers cutting through the city.

City engineers hope to better synchronize traffic signals along the thoroughfare to ease congestion along the route.

“We’re going to be taking a look at the whole signal system along Soledad Canyon Road to see what we can do,” Janka said.

* Lyons Avenue. Because it is a connection to the jammed San Fernando Road and with the parallel Soledad Canyon Road packed to the north, many drivers are trying to cut across this east-west road. Trucks rarely crossed this road before the quake but now travel it frequently.

As they have done with most expenses incurred as Santa Clarita deals with quake damage, city officials plan to ask the Federal Emergency Management Agency to reimburse repair costs.

Cities are eligible to apply for federal funds for secondary damage to streets from the Jan. 17 earthquake, according to Harry Sherwood, who reviews street and public works claims for FEMA.

“It could be said this damage is directly the result of the earthquake,” Sherwood said. “The freeway is down, and that traffic definitely has to go somewhere.”

Even if Santa Clarita is reimbursed for repairs, that doesn’t make the commute any shorter or the roads any smoother in the meantime. Overflow traffic is expected to continue clogging surface streets for the months it takes to repair damage to the Golden State and Antelope Valley freeways.

“We’re going to be impacted by that for a very long time,” Janka said.