Powerful Storm Pounds State : Thousands Evacuate Homes, Scores Rescued : Weather: Helicopters pluck stranded residents from swollen rivers and creeks. Entire towns are isolated in Northern California and mudslides hit the Southland.

A vengeful Pacific storm barreled across the length of California on Tuesday, forcing thousands to evacuate their flood-ruined homes, prompting rescue workers to dangle from helicopters and pluck endangered residents from torrential rivers, and further inundating a state brought to its knees by a weeklong series of brutal weather systems.

The newest storm slammed into Southern California before dawn, snarling traffic and bringing Amtrak service and some Metrolink trains to a standstill. As the long and grimy day wore on, mud cascading from the area’s hillsides threatened dozens of homes and undermined a series of bridges.

In the south, flash flood warnings were in effect from Riverside to Santa Barbara, a 200-mile stretch. Flooding was reported in virtually every area. Schools, from kindergarten to college, sent students home early--or refused to take them at all. Even an industry that values make-believe--the movies--conceded to the awful reality and closed up shop early.

During the evening rush hour, the California Highway Patrol struggled to clear freeways of hundreds of accidents--several times the normal number--as ribbons of brake lights illuminated miles of clogged roads. Partial closures hit the San Diego, Golden State, Long Beach, Harbor, Ventura and Hollywood freeways--virtually every major thoroughfare in metropolitan Los Angeles. Pacific Coast Highway and the Sierra Highway into the Santa Clarita Valley were closed as well.

At nightfall, President Clinton declared 24 California counties as federal disaster areas, paving the way for financial assistance to residents and businesses. Gov. Pete Wilson, who spent the afternoon in an aerial tour of devastated Northern California communities--some of which were entirely cut off by floodwaters--has formally declared 17 counties as disaster areas in the last week, including Los Angeles, Orange and Santa Barbara. Several, including Ventura, have declarations pending. Separately, local emergencies have been declared in 21 counties and 25 cities.

In Ventura County, where U.S. 101 was closed earlier in the day, entire communities were swamped and residents were brought to safety in dramatic aerial rescues broadcast live on television to millions of Southern Californians.

Throughout the day, Sheriff’s Department helicopters swooped down over a homeless encampment in the bed of the rampaging Ventura River to rescue stranded residents. At least 10 people were airlifted and dropped onto a road behind a levee that protects the city of Ventura from flooding. Later, however, the body of a man believed to be a resident of the homeless camp was found entangled in river reeds.

Lois Guy of Santa Paula spoke for many Southern Californians when she lamented her family’s recent brushes with disaster. Their home in Woodland Hills was destroyed almost a year ago in the Northridge earthquake. They moved to Santa Paula in August, and on Tuesday were evacuated from their new home.

“January has not been our month,” she said.

One of the most dramatic demonstrations of nature’s fury occurred in normally serene Santa Barbara, where broad sections of the town were swamped after seven inches of rain fell between noon Monday and Tuesday--an all-time record.

“And it is still raining,” the National Weather Service added. By nightfall, 250 people had registered at six emergency shelters set up in Santa Barbara County.

The man found in the Ventura River was the first confirmed storm-related death in Southern California. Late Tuesday, another man died during an apparent attempt to rescue a 7-year-old boy who fell into the swift-moving waters of Trabuco Creek, an Orange County Fire Department spokesman said. Rescuers were searching for the boy and two other people, and San Bernardino authorities were investigating a report that a person clinging desperately to a bicycle had been swept down a raging flood control channel there.

Two people were reported dead Monday and Tuesday in Northern California, both killed when trees toppled by the storm fell onto their cars.

All told, almost three inches of rain fell at the Los Angeles Civic Center by late afternoon, bringing the seasonal total to 10.65 inches, almost double the normal amount for the date. There were widespread variations, however--Pasadena recorded 5.3 inches, El Toro 2.31 and the Matilija Creek station in Santa Barbara recorded 12.32 inches.

There was some good news for Southern California, where weather forecasters said the storm is expected to taper to scattered showers today and Thursday. But the outlook was worse for the north, which has endured days of flooding. Rain there will continue through the weekend.

In Northern California on Tuesday, entire towns were isolated as floodwaters overreached riverbanks. Army National Guard helicopters rescued people by the score from hard-hit Guerneville north of San Francisco even as rains there began to ease.

James Bailey of the state and federal flood operations center in Sacramento called the storm system a “1,000-year precipitation.”

In the Placer County city of Roseville, authorities said 100 houses were evacuated by flooding that exceeded 100-year flood levels. The National Guard, preparing for more evacuations there, sent three large trucks and a bridge boat to the town, whose retirement home was threatened with flooding.

Elsewhere in the county, which extends from the Sacramento suburbs to North Lake Tahoe, homes and businesses were battered.

“It’s flooding up to the rooftops,” said a Placer County sheriff’s deputy. “They are using boats in the streets.”

The north’s rural areas were not alone: Parts of urban San Jose also were under water.

$41 Million in Damage

The swath of destruction and damage was awesome. Thousands of homes statewide had been evacuated by Tuesday afternoon, and the state Office of Emergency Services said initial reports put damage at $41 million--a figure with nowhere to go but up.

About 100,000 homes and businesses in Central and Northern California were without power Tuesday, Pacific Gas & Electric officials said, and another 90,000 Southern California customers were in the dark for some part of the day. Statewide, the Red Cross was operating 35 shelters for the displaced.

Ironically, the storm hit Southern California as federal emergency services chief James Lee Witt was in town to discuss the status of recovery efforts from last January’s Northridge earthquake.

Across California, from Riverside virtually to the Oregon border, a state that has been on disaster footing for a week saw scenes reminiscent of a week ago, when another deluge hit California.

In Carson, volunteers filled sandbags to build fortress walls around homes that were flooded in last Wednesday’s siege. In east Newhall, violent runoff forced the residents of low-income apartments to scramble to safety on their second floor. Outside, seemingly oblivious to the danger, children clad in rain gear poked at debris clogging gutters.

Jeff and Carol Deeter left their home on Wonderview Drive in Glendale on Tuesday morning, shortly before mud slammed through a retaining wall and into their master bedroom. Alerted by police, they returned home to find firefighters standing on their bed, handing Jeff Deeter’s suits out the window.

“They were 17 very expensive suits,” said Deeter, who with his wife was among nine families voluntarily evacuated from the area. “We just threw them in a bag and took them to the cleaners.”

In the Mt. Olympus area of the Hollywood Hills, a 30-foot section of muddy hillside--and a 25-foot tree--crashed through a retaining wall and into a bedroom occupied by Harry and Armella Grebbs. The mud slid the couple, in their bed, across the room and forced them to flee for safety. Both were treated for injuries at St. Josephs Medical Center in Burbank, officials said.

The scenes ranged from the tragic to the visually comic: In Long Beach, neighborhoods were closed to all but residents when pressure in storm drains caused manhole covers to pop like champagne corks. It was no laughing matter, as police spokeswoman Margarita DeWitt made clear. “The pipes have so much pressure in them, (we’re) afraid they’re going to blow,” she said.

The storm moved inland from north to south, with Northern California bearing the earliest and most severe onslaught. One of the hardest hit was Roseville, where homes were built in the 1960s and 1970s before flood maps existed. What drew people there--the scenic creekside views--served as their downfall Tuesday.

“The creeks are just lovely and people naturally wanted to build along them,” said city spokeswoman Marilyn Bartell. “They are small creeks, but they drain a large basin from the mountains.”

Elsewhere in Northern California, homes and businesses were still submerged from flooding that ran rampant beginning Monday.

Dramatic Rescues

As the waters receded in the small town of Tehema on the Sacramento River, some residents who had been evacuated returned temporarily Tuesday to collect belongings. But the town remained dark and quiet, except for a local bar with a hastily drawn sign.

“They had sandbags all around it. It had a big ‘ole sign on it saying, ‘Open. Open. Open,’ ” Kandie Gallant of Red Bluff said. “There were cars all around it.”

But the U.S. Post Office next door was, she said, “black and closed.”

In Contra Costa County, downtown Martinez and parts of San Pablo were under a foot of water. Mudslides had damaged homes in Lafayette, Moraga and Orinda, and the county emergency services director offered this warning:

“Our ground is saturated, so if we continue to get heavy rains, it will just add to the problem,” Gary Brown said. “The ground just can’t take any more water.”

Authorities said 62 people were in shelters in San Jose to the south, where 30 homes were damaged by minor flooding and a few others by fallen trees.

If Northern California was hard hit, the storm was no less damaging to Central California. Santa Barbara’s record rainfall turned the city’s quaint streets into raging rivers. Teen-agers rode Boogie Boards down Santa Cruz Boulevard and others went kayaking on lower State Street.

The First Presbyterian Church served as one of the city’s shelters, and there Senior Minister Robert Pryor said it was “raining buckets.”

“People are running from their homes with literally nothing,” he said. “They are still reeling from the shock.”

In the church shelter, Baldomero and Virgilia Garcia sat quietly with their three children. They had been up since early morning, awakened by water rushing past their Ortega Street home.

“I saw what looked like a river,” Baldomero Garcia said. “My wife’s car was floating down the street. Lots of things were floating down the street: TVs, even a car with people in it, with a man crying for help out of the window.

“My wife told me she was going to work. I said, ‘How are you going to work? . . . This water would carry you like a feather all the way to the beach.’ ”

Farther south, the Ventura River overflowed its banks spottily, flooding small communities from Ventura to Ojai and causing new damage in a recreational vehicle park that also was flooded in the torrential storm of February, 1992. This time, however, most of the residents were able to leave before the major flooding hit. Ojai, Fillmore and Santa Paula were cut off from the rest of Ventura County by mudslides and other road closures. All eight lanes of U.S. 101 in Ventura were closed by rising water, though the road partially reopened in the evening.

Anna Mendoza and her 20-month-old daughter Angelic were among those who fled the homeless encampment early Tuesday morning before the river rose and blocked the land exits.

“We lost everything we had--clothes, pots, pans. . . . It just got to the point where we had to get out, so I just grabbed my baby and we ran.”

She said her daughter seemed to be holding up well, adding, “All my little girl has said today is ‘wa-wa, wa-wa.’ ”

Rescue workers also evacuated scores of other Ventura County residents trapped in their homes by rising floodwaters, which across the county threatened croplands and the Pt. Mugu Naval Base.

Undermined Bridges

“I’m just taking me and my lipstick,” said Kay Hollingsworth, one of the elderly residents escorted from the Arroyo Mobile Home Park in Casitas Springs. “What else do you do when you have 100 years worth of things and you have to carry it away on your back?”

The raging floodwaters not only eroded the muddy riverbanks but also undermined bridges in several areas. Near rural Live Oak Acres in Ventura County, 100 residents stood in a driving rain to see if the two-lane bridge that links them to Oak View would tumble into the Ventura River.

At the beach in Malibu, the hillsides that have somehow stayed together despite a week of debilitating rains began to give way. Rushing brown water and boulders coursed down creeks and roads alike, turning all into a roiling mess.

Thirty homes were ordered evacuated, and into the afternoon the surging Las Flores Creek threatened to wash away homes and swept away much of a local landmark, Cosentino’s Nursery.

As a brigade of family members and friends rushed antiques, baskets, flowerpots and curios out of the building, Joie Cosentino passed out lilies, purple daisies and sunflowers to bystanders, who then gathered to watch the destruction with curiously colorful bouquets in hand.

“What else are we going to do with them?” asked a weeping Cosentino.

In nearby Topanga Canyon, residents compared the storm to a cataclysmic weather system in 1990, when portions of the roads serving the area were washed out.

At the Inn of the Seventh Ray, an organic restaurant and canyon landmark, the patio was underwater, and owner Lucille Yanet chanted furiously to try to stop the rain. Pacing back and forth on the rooftop in full rain gear, she chanted, “Out, out, stop the rain.”

“What I’m doing, by the way, is calling to the elementals to stop the rain,” she said. “I am not freaking out.”

In Orange County, roads were snarled with traffic and schools were closed but there was not the massive displacement wreaked by the last storm. Among those protected at three lightly attended county emergency shelters were 25 Laguna Beach residents, most of them children evacuated from a nearby elementary school.

Throughout the state, schools closed down early Tuesday, if they had opened at all. In the hardest hit areas, including Sacramento, schools planned to stay closed today as well. The Los Angeles Unified School District said it will decide early today whether to hold classes. District officials encouraged parents to listen to television and radio reports today before sending their children to school.

Storm Coverage

* LEVEE SCHOOL--A forestry official is giving prison inmates a lesson in patching levees. A17

* A FINE MESS--Commuters and travelers were delayed no matter how or where they went. B1

* DAMAGE AFIELD--Prices for avocados, strawberries, broccoli and oranges are likely to go up. D1

* ADDITIONAL STORIES, PICTURES, GRAPHICS: A16-17, B1-3, D1, D3