Last I-5 Bridge Victim Found : Floods: Volunteer searchers recover the woman’s body seven miles downstream. Elsewhere in state, some residents remain evacuated.

The search for the seventh victim of the Interstate 5 bridge collapse ended Wednesday afternoon when friends and family members found the body of an 18-year-old college student buried in the mud of Arroyo Pasajero creek.

The body of Martha Zavala was found about seven miles downstream from where her car fell into floodwaters near Coalinga after the double-span bridge collapsed Friday in a storm.

The searchers, most of them farm workers from Zavala’s hometown of Huron, complained bitterly Wednesday that official rescue workers had abandoned them. The volunteer searchers had slogged through waist-high mud since Saturday. They were instrumental in finding the bodies of all seven people who were in cars that went off the freeway in the storm, which claimed 14 lives statewide.

“We feel that if these were seven white bodies, the official efforts might have been more,” said Huron Mayor Ramon R. Dominguez. Authorities, however, praised the official search effort.

Caltrans officials said Wednesday that they expect a temporary, one-lane replacement bridge on Interstate 5 to open sometime over the weekend as promised. Although a 184-mile stretch of the crucial corridor is still closed to outside traffic, the freeway was opened to local residents north and south of the bridge.

Waterlogged residents and recovery workers statewide took advantage Wednesday of the first full day of sunshine to assess damage, spot sewage spills and bleed floodwaters from rapidly filling reservoirs.

Swollen rivers throughout the state continued to recede, leaving only two major trouble spots. Clear Lake, about 100 miles north of the Bay Area, was still rising, and the Sacramento River near Tehama remained several feet above flood level. The town is largely submerged.

In the hilly resort region of Clear Lake, several hundred homes had up to a foot of water inside Wednesday. Evacuations were voluntary.

Dale Owens, who lives on the shore of the lake, spent the night in a junior high school shelter because his mobile home “was floating” Tuesday night. “I ain’t never seen so much water,” he said.

In Ventura County, city workers in Thousand Oaks managed to stop a major storm-related sewage spill that has dumped an estimated 10 million gallons of raw effluent into Arroyo Conejo.

Laboring into the early morning under spotlights, workers repaired a 50-foot length of a sewer main that had washed away during last weekend’s thunderstorm. But county officials remained concerned about the lingering public health threat.

In an advisory released Wednesday, the county’s Environmental Health Division urged the public to avoid contact with the creek and ocean water within 10 miles of Mugu Lagoon for at least another three days.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, our concerns are about a 6,” said Robert Williamson, a county environmental health manager. “Contracting hepatitis is a fairly remote possibility, yet the infection in some cases can be very serious.”

In addition to the sewage leak, the late-winter storms caused nearly 2,000 gallons of crude oil to spill in the Ventura County mountains above the Ventura River, state and local officials said Wednesday. Mudslides caused by heavy rain and deeply saturated ground spurred at least six oil or gas spills at many production leases over the last week, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

The washed-out bridge on California 1 over the Carmel River was not reopened Wednesday as expected because of problems with the temporary replacement bridge, said Aggie Lopez, spokeswoman for the Monterey County Office of Emergency Services.

On Wednesday in the farm town of Huron, Martha Zavala’s mother and grandmother heard the news that they had been waiting for--but dreading.

For five days, her mother and grandmother had been waiting by the phone, still clinging to the slim hope that she would be found alive. The muddy waters carried Zavala so far downstream that her body was found less than a mile from home.

“It’s over,” said her grandmother, Mercedes Ruiz.

Zavala and a friend, Linda Muniz, were driving home to Huron Friday night when the bridge gave way to the force of the floodwaters in the normally dry creek bed.

Muniz’s funeral was scheduled for Friday, but after Zavala’s body was found her family decided to delay the funeral so the two friends could be buried together.

Arax reported from Fresno, La Ganga from Los Angeles. Times staff writers Kenneth R. Weiss and Julie Fields and community correspondents Paul Elias and Jeff McDonald in Ventura contributed to this report.