Project Takes Low Road as Sinkhole Swallows a Car : Camarillo: Pothole in Santa Rosa Road is blamed on rupture of new water main. Emergency repairs should be completed by tonight.

It was not quite the sinkhole that ate Camarillo.

But the five-foot-deep pothole that swallowed one car and shook up its driver has gobbled up a dozen feet of blacktop on the outskirts of town and now threatens to delay ongoing construction on Santa Rosa Road for several weeks.

If all goes as planned, road crews will finish emergency repairs by nightfall today on the patch of road that was undermined by a leaking water main Sunday night.

“It’s a major inconvenience,” said Butch Britt, the county’s deputy public works director. As many as 15,000 cars a day zip along the rural two-lane road that connects Camarillo to Thousand Oaks and Moorpark, he said.

As far as anyone can tell, the problem surfaced shortly before 8 p.m. Sunday when Bob Poffenbarger noticed a freshwater spring bubbling up near his rosebush where his yard meets the road.

The water kept on coming and soon swamped a 25-foot-section of the asphalt that was laid as a short detour while road crews finish the final phase of widening Santa Rosa Road.

Motorists continued to drive through the calf-deep water until Michelle Delgado attempted to ford the water in her 1986 Mazda RX-7, a sporty car that she had bought a couple of weeks earlier, according to witnesses.

Just then, an impatient teen-ager sped around her, passing her on the left, witnesses said. The asphalt buckled, stranding the Mazda in the middle of the rising waters.

Poffenbarger, 67, said he, his son-in-law and another man extended a wooden pallet across the water to reach Delgado in her slowly sinking car.

“We were able to pull her out of the car,” Poffenbarger said. “She was awfully shook up. She was crying and thought it was her fault because she tried to cross the water.”

A few minutes later, one of the men retrieved Delgado’s purse from the waters that had risen to the dashboard. Within another hour, the brown car had slipped from view, totally submerged in the water-filled hole.

Mike Haney, owner of Roadway Towing in Camarillo, plucked the car from the water about 1 a.m. The exterior of the car looks pretty good, he said, but the inside will never be the same.

“It’s totaled,” he said. “The wires are fried. The engine is probably shot too.”

Delgado, an Oxnard resident, could not be reached for comment Monday.

The sinkhole was blamed on the rupture of a 24-inch water main that the Camrosa Water District uses to haul ground water to about 20,000 customers in Camarillo.

As the California Highway Patrol blocked off Santa Rosa Road between Hilltop Lane and Gerry Road, crews worked quickly to replace a section of the pipe that had split along its 20-foot length.

The plastic pipe with inch-thick walls was put into service just two months ago, said Richard H. Hajas, Camrosa’s general manager. “It’s like glass. Once it starts to rip, it keeps going.”

Yet only three Camrosa water customers were without water Monday, as the utility company drew on supplies from other points in its system, he said. The pipeline repairs were on schedule for completion Monday.

Road crews hope to pave over the sinkhole today.

“I don’t think we will be open in time for commuter traffic, but it should be open before dark,” said Dennis Mullican, a road crew supervisor.

The leak inundated an adjacent portion of the permanent road, however, and it may force road crews to wait a couple of weeks before resuming the final phase of the six-year widening project.

“If we can get back to work pretty soon,” Mullican said, “we ought to have it done within two months.”