New Storm Damage Will Cost Millions : Rains: Estimated expenses include La Conchita slide response and repairs to roadways and a water pipeline.

The public price tag for the latest storms and landslide to strike Ventura County will amount to millions of dollars, county officials said Monday.

Weekend rains wreaked havoc on area roadways, ruptured a water line and knocked out a Ventura River bridge, prompting local officials Monday to draw up repair plans and begin to figure out how to pay for them.

Immediate costs identified by emergency officials and local farmers include:

* At least $1.75 million in La Conchita-related costs to the Sheriff’s Department and other county agencies responding to a landslide, not including the removal of 600,000 tons of earth or the cost of rebuilding more than a dozen ruined homes.

* As much as $1 million in cracked and broken county roadways, excluding La Conchita.

* At least $40,000 to repair a Casitas Municipal Water District pipeline in the Rincon area north of Ventura.

* Undetermined expenses to the city of Ventura, where engineers spent Monday studying the collapsed Main Street Bridge. City officials have no estimate of what those repairs might cost.

* Millions of dollars worth of damaged fruit and vegetables, possibly pushing up produce prices by summer.

* Hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs to private drainage sloughs and other farm-related losses.

Much of the expense to local agencies eventually will be reimbursed by the federal government, but it often takes three years or more to be fully paid back, one county official said.

“We’ve gone through so many disasters here in Ventura County and we’re not in a position to front that money,” said Wendy Haddock, assistant director of the county disaster services agency. “We don’t even have the money to run our own government.”

Meanwhile, many Ventura County growers on Monday were sizing up crop damage wrought by the most recent storm. By most accounts, the outlook is not good.

“We’re going to lose a good 30% of what we’re harvesting right now,” said Doug Wagner, who farms 100 acres of strawberries in Oxnard and manages another 250 acres for a nearby grower.

“We’re trying to save the Easter crop,” he said. “If it doesn’t rain anymore, I think we’ll be OK. But there’s going to be a shortage this year, no doubt.”

David Buettner, Ventura County’s chief deputy agriculture commissioner, said the weekend storm caused at least several million dollars in damage. That does not include long-term losses such as disease or repairs to drainage systems in individual farms.

“A lot of things don’t show up immediately,” he said. “But considering the information I have now, I don’t expect that it will be as high (as January). But that’s only a preliminary guess.”

The storm washed away a handful of grapefruit trees in Somis when a runoff slough overflowed its banks and ate into an orchard owned by the Underwood family.

“We’ll come in and try and repair it so it doesn’t happen again,” farmer Craig Underwood said. “If you add it all up, there’s quite a bit that we’ll have to spend on repairs. But I haven’t tallied it up yet.”

In mud-soaked La Conchita, where a weakened hillside continues to threaten scores of homes, residents Monday were told to ration their water.

Officials at the Casitas Municipal Water District reported Monday that landslides twisted a major transfer pipe in the mountains north of the Ventura River, cutting off water indefinitely to hundreds of homes.

General Manager John Johnson said there is only enough storage to last for about two days, and beach community residents north of Ventura may be without freshwater by Wednesday. The district has asked residents to use water only for cooking and sanitation.

“We have a very limited water supply until we can re-establish that line,” he said. Although it may take months to repair the line, Johnson said, Casitas hopes to build a bypass within days.

At the Limoneira Co. in Santa Paula, the largest lemon grower and processor in the county, officials said numerous orchards were flooded and damaged.

“I’m just in the process of seeing what we’ve got,” Vice President Chris Taylor said.

Taylor did say the storms destroyed more than $150,000 of drainage repairs the company made after the heavy rain two months ago.

“As far as we’re concerned, it’s just money out of our pocket,” Taylor said. “You just fix what’s broken and go on.”

Robert Riggs, the Sheriff’s Department business manager, said the costs associated with monitoring a landslide are unavoidable, even though some homeowners refused to leave.

“To those people (in La Conchita) . . . that’s what they’re paying their tax dollars for, and in their mind it’s worth it,” Riggs said.

County public works officials said they spent $4.3 million repaving roads after the January floods, and they expect to spend another $1 million or more to make repairs caused by the latest storms.

“It’s going to be considerably lower,” said county engineer Robert Brownie. “We didn’t have the same amount of damage and some of the work we did in January prevented other damage.”

But the $1-million estimate he provided Monday does not include road repair expenses related to La Conchita. “We really don’t know how much damage has been done to Vista del Rincon,” Brownie said.

* PRICES RISE: State’s produce costs went up due to effects of deluge. D1