THE CALIFORNIA DELUGE : Laguna Residents Must Dig Out From Yet Another Disaster : Recovery: Storm swamps businesses, wipes out Main Beach, closes roads. One man calls himself ‘aggravated, frustrated, depressed.’

Ordinarily, Ron Paradis answers the phone at Johnny Rocket’s, his downtown hamburger joint, by saying, “It’s a great day at the beach!” But lately, he says it differently, as though the caller had said, “Hold the sincerity.”

These days, Paradis’ anger has gone from rare to well-done.

“We’re lucky no one’s been killed” in Laguna, he said with a snarl Wednesday. “We’re aggravated, frustrated, depressed. . . . We expect another storm, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Right now, I’m just standin’ here helpless, feeling like a fool.”

The trauma downtown is another example of nature’s wrath on Laguna Beach, a city under siege little more than a year after a devastating firestorm in late 1993 inflicted more than $528 million in damage.

Life here in recent days has been one of clogged or closed routes connecting the city with the outside world and commutes that take as long as five hours; telephone service that goes dead when the rainfall gets heavy; school children evacuated without notice, then left standing ankle deep in water because school and commercial buses left them stranded, and an ever-growing sense of paranoia about the rustic hillsides that give the city much of its quaint charm.

Memories of the day before were painfully fresh in Laguna on Wednesday.

As three-foot-tall waters sped down Laguna Canyon, Lisa Rasberry said she forgot about the pot roast she had been cooking for her boyfriend, John Phillips, 35, and son, Donnie, 6.

Her thoughts were on how she and Donnie could escape without getting hurt. The two were marooned. And as seen from the kitchen window, the waters appeared to be rising.

Phillips was outside trying to protect his property, his nearly restored 1942 Ford “Woody” and his wood shop.

“I thought we were going to get wiped out,” recalled Rasberry, 32. “The first thing I said was, ‘Where’s Donnie’s life jacket?’ It was in the boat, but that was in front of the house.”

Wearing shorts and knee-high rubber boots, Phillips, a contractor, slogged through six-inch mud Wednesday while surveying the mess. He needed to find a place to bury “Snowball,” one of his five pet turkeys that didn’t make it through the night.

“It was radical,” Phillips said. “It was raging.”

A few doors down, Duane Matekel, a 30-year-old landscaper, and his wife, Trecia, 25, tried to prepare their soggy property for the next storm. They were flooded out of their rental house Tuesday night and had to sleep at a relative’s home in town.

“There’s not a lot else I can do except preventive stuff and help out the neighbors,” Duane Matekel said. “It’s basically a neighborhood effort to save everybody’s house.”

Residents of this tony enclave cherish their isolation from the rest of the world. But as many said Wednesday, not this much isolation.

Even under normal conditions, Laguna residents have only two ways to leave town--through Laguna Canyon Road or on Coast Highway.

But both routes have been cut off by waves of mud that rushed down the canyon, flooded the downtown and wrecked its popular Main Beach. Paradis and other merchants have seen their business plunge.

Just as it did in the 1993 inferno, the beloved canyon that shields this eclectic town from urban intrusion has turned against its residents, who include former baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth. Past Lagunaites have included O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson, singer Bette Midler, Watergate figure H.R. Haldeman, actress Betty Davis and rock singer Ricky Nelson.

Twice in the past week, traffic has been the great equalizer, lumping the famous with the not-so-well-known under a shared umbrella of frustration and panic.

Police officers have directed motorists along a convoluted path through downtown, funneled into narrow side streets before finally reaching Coast Highway north.

Many have found their major route to the northbound freeways--Newport Coast Drive--also cut off by flooding, with cars detoured through the UC Irvine campus before they can even hope of making it to a freeway.

For those who want to stay put, the situation is just as maddening.

Along with dozens of other downtown merchants, Paradis blames Laguna Beach for redeveloping Main Beach so that it now forms “a natural dam,” where, in his words, “the rain stops and starts backing up Ocean Boulevard. And then, everything gets flooded.”

With fingers pointed squarely at them, the city establishment, in turn, blames the Transportation Corridor Agencies for grading Laguna Canyon, through which the 17-mile San Joaquin Hill toll road will eventually pass, connecting Newport Beach with San Juan Capistrano.

In Laguna, known for a thriving arts community, as well as being a haven for two of Orange County’s minority groups--homosexuals and Democrats--environmentalists have even talked of placing their bodies in front of bulldozers in an effort to save the canyon.

“We are just the entertainment capital of the world,” Liz Reese, a 50-year-old hairdresser, said Wednesday. “But we’d like to give that title up.”

Times staff writer Len Hall and correspondent Leslie Earnest contributed to this report.