Showers Fill Lakes and Close Roads : Weather: Here comes the sun, forecasters say, probably this afternoon and for the weekend. County receives up to three more inches of rain in some areas.

Rains drenched Ventura County again Wednesday, finally filling Lake Casitas to its brim, closing flooded highways and dropping up to three inches of water in the mountains.

But forecasters said the county has probably seen the last of its pelting rainstorms for the week, predicting that light showers will cede to some clouds and sunshine by this afternoon. That should leave the skies clear for a dry, sunny weekend, with highs in the 60s, said meteorologists at the National Weather Service.

Wednesday’s unrelenting showers filled Lake Casitas to overflow levels, sending 1,500 gallons a second tumbling down a concrete spillway and into Coyote Creek, where it flowed down to the Ventura River before finally reaching the ocean.

Hydrologists at the dam said the lake would probably spill into the channel for a few weeks until the water level falls at the dam.

Officials at the United Water Conservation District said Lake Piru was also due to reach its spill limits Wednesday evening, pushing excess water down a channel to Piru Creek, and then to the Santa Clara River.

“It will start slowly and go for many weeks,” said Fred Gientke, the district’s general manager.

With rains still pounding the county on Wednesday, officials closed a number of highways, shutting off traffic on California 150 between Santa Ana Road and the Santa Barbara County line; on Pacific Coast Highway from the state beaches to Seacliff; and on California 154 between San Antonio Creek Road and Painted Cave. California 23, which has been closed most of the month due to mudslides and other hazards, remained closed Wednesday.

About 3,000 homes in the Oak View area lost power briefly Tuesday night when a tree, pummeled by rain, crashed down on a Southern California power line at about 11:45 p.m., officials said. Power was restored within 30 minutes to all but 100 homes, which did not get their power back until late Wednesday morning, officials said.

This month’s storms have left persistent problems at Ventura Harbor, where high swells pushed sand into the mouth of the harbor, narrowing its entrance from 250 feet to about 80 to 100 feet.

Richard Parsons, general manager of the Ventura Port District, said the harbor had been scheduled for dredging in the fall, but the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers refused to award the contract because the entrance was 30 feet deep.

Today, he said, the entrance is about 16 feet deep.

“They canceled the $2.4 million dredging job,” Parsons said. “It’s now obvious they should have dredged, and if they had, we wouldn’t have had this (buildup on the) shoal.”

The Army Corps of Engineers is now scheduled to dredge the harbor mouth sometime in February.

Officials in Ojai also wrestled this week with repairing a busted sewer main, severed in this month’s storms when a row of sycamore trees toppled onto it. The break in the 15-inch pipe spewed about 2 million gallons of raw sewage into the creek and down the swollen Ventura River.

On Tuesday, an environmental group called Friends of the Ventura River sent a letter to the Ojai Valley Sanitary District, complaining that district officials should have long ago moved the pipe farther away from the river, to avoid such calamities.

“I concur,” said Eric Oltmann, the district’s general manager. “We’ve washed out in the past and the lines need to be moved. But it’s the cost, the cost.”

Oltmann said he hopes this latest emergency will allow the district to receive federal disaster money to help pay the estimated $160,000 cost of moving the pipe.

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COLOR, County Rainfall Here are rainfall figures from the Ventura County Flood Control Department for the 24-hour period ending at 8 p.m. Wednesday. Oct. 1 is the beginning of the official rain year.

Rainfall Rainfall Normal rainfall Location last 24 hours since Oct. 1 to date Camarillo 0.47 15.29 6.72 Casitas Dam 2.28 30.14 11.43 El Rio 0.79 19.04 7.29 Fillmore 0.94 21.41 9.35 Moorpark 0.67 16.64 7.22 Ojai 0.31 23.69 10.16 Upper Ojai 0.35 30.19 10.87 Oxnard N/A N/A 7.01 Piru 1.02 20.06 8.35 Santa Paula 0.31 19.49 8.58 Simi Valley 0.94 16.81 6.90 Thousand Oaks 1.18 18.89 7.41 Ventura Govt. Center 1.26 20.80 7.76