County in Race to Finish Flood Repair : Safety: Debris basins are being cleared while public agencies brace for winter.

Already clobbered by an early storm, Ventura County is racing to complete its mammoth repair job in the wake of this year’s deadly floods before the full force of winter hits.

With 36 projects totaling more than $31 million, the county’s Flood Control District is cleaning debris basins, clearing out flood-prone streams and restoring river banks.

Public safety agencies are also bracing for winter’s onslaught.

Since the raging rivers and streams killed one man and trapped dozens last winter, both the sheriff’s and fire departments have established specially trained, swift-water rescue teams.

And while fire stations across the county have stocked up on sandbags, the Sheriff’s Department has upgraded communications systems at its emergency operations center and fine-tuned its disaster response plans.

Unless heavy rains douse the county in the next few weeks, county officials say they will be ready for winter’s wet wrath.

“We still have some soft spots where we haven’t completed our repairs,” said Art Goulet, director of the county’s Public Works Agency. “But if the weather holds, that is if the [latest storms] are the worst we get for now, we should not have any trouble.”

Meteorologists are predicting a normal winter for a change, thanks to the absence of El Nino, the weather pattern that brought heavy rains in January and March.

“We will still have our share of storms I’m sure,” said Rob Krohn of the National Weather Service in Oxnard. “But we will probably not have a situation where we get into one debilitating storm after another.”

Some of the damage from last winter’s storms--including a sewer pipe rupture in Thousand Oaks--was repaired immediately. Some projects--such as fixes to Ventura’s Main Street bridge and California 150--won’t be completed for several months. And some--such as the Ventura Pier--were repaired only to be damaged again in the first storm of the season.

As another winter approaches, county residents give local government mixed reviews for its help in cleanup and flood-control work after the January and March disasters.

Casitas Springs residents who live along San Antonio Creek applauded the county’s decision in November to enlarge the silt-laden mountain stream, which flooded properties earlier this year.

“The county has worked well with us,” said Darleen Hall, a 66-year-old Creek Road resident and one of about 30 homeowners in the area. “I would say [county officials] are on our side.”

But environmentalists and some regulatory agencies have questioned the proposed $1.15-million project’s impact on the waterway’s ecosystem, which includes a steelhead trout population. Any delay might threaten the availability of a special federal emergency grant, jeopardizing the project and leaving residents fearful that strong rains could cause more flooding.

“If [the creek] is let go, it is going to wash out Creek Road and no one will be able to get out,” Hall said.

The U. S. Army Corps of Engineers is expected to decide Monday whether the project needs additional environmental review.

Mark Capelli, executive director of Friends of the Ventura River, said county officials are moving too fast on the project just to meet a funding deadline. Concerned about possible damage to the environment, Capelli also argues that the project will be ineffective, because the sediment will soon return to the stream bed after the work is completed.

“The property owners will not get the level of protection they have been told they will get,” Capelli said.

In La Conchita, where a 600,000-ton landslide crushed residences and filled streets with mud in March, residents believe the county has not done all it can to help them find a way to stabilize the collapsed hillside.

Since the disaster, county officials have sought more than $300,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency--so far without success--to conduct a study to determine how to shore up the sagging hill. A minor mudslide occurred north of the seaside community after a storm Wednesday, eroding residents’ hopes that any work will begin before the storm season.

“[County officials] have washed their hand of us,” said 57-year-old La Conchita resident George Caputo, whose three-story house was flattened by the March 4 slide. “The county does not know there is a La Conchita. They wish we would go away.”

But county officials counter that they have done all they can for the residents by pressuring FEMA and pleading for help from officials and politicians from Washington to Sacramento.

“I think people in La Conchita are incredibly frustrated and I am incredibly frustrated as well,” said Supervisor Maggie Kildee, whose district includes the community. “We keep trying to find out from FEMA what it is we need in order for the money to free up and we just keep getting a blank or a no but nothing that says a maybe or a yes.”

In April, the county installed six measuring devices designed to track the movement of the earth--at a cost of more than $60,000 each. But the so-called inclinometers are not early warning systems, because they cannot predict when a landslide will occur. And because the hillside belongs to a private ranch, county officials maintain that the burden of stabilizing the earth remains with the ranch owners and the residents.

“There has always been a [county] emergency response plan and it has been updated,” said Marty Robinson, the county’s deputy chief administrative officer, adding that some estimates to stabilize the hill exceed $25 million. “If [the ranch owners and residents] are not financially capable of solving the hazard themselves, who funds the fix? The issue that we are confronting here is a private-property-versus-private-property issue.”

Meanwhile, 137 La Conchita residents have filed a suit against La Conchita Ranch Corp., contending that the irrigation of citrus and avocado trees on the bluff overlooking the seaside community contributed to the landslide.

The ranch owners deny the charge, but said they will spend about $100,000 for erosion control on top of the $200,000 they already paid for cleanup work after the landslide.

Despite some trouble spots, many flood repair and control projects are proceeding, and with relatively little delay or controversy.

Workers in October began removing about 346,000 cubic yards of material deposited in Calleguas Creek near Camarillo during the winter storms. Without the project, officials feared the creek could overflow its banks as it did in 1980, when a majority of the housing units and several other facilities at Point Mugu Navy base were flooded.

Alex Sheydayi, deputy director of the county’s Public Works Agency, called the $1.1-million debris-removal project one of the department’s biggest priorities.

“If Calleguas breaks out, it floods the base,” Sheydayi said.

And workers along Arroyo Simi near Moorpark began construction on a 3,700-foot concrete riprap wall in November to improve the stream’s flow and protect the nearby Home Acres community from floods. Sheydayi said the $4.3-million project will also prevent millions of gallons of sewage from dumping in the stream as in past storms.

Money to pay for many of the projects will eventually come from FEMA, though the agency has taken its time to reimburse the county. The Flood Control District has submitted $9.7 million in damage claims to FEMA following last winter’s severe storms, but has so far received only about $100,000. Other county agencies must also contend with the sluggish payback rates, compelling them to dip into reserves or to delay capital projects.

“[Federal money] has started to trickle in, but it is not like you get the whole amount right away,” said Wendy Milligan, assistant director of the sheriff’s Office of Emergency Services. “It does put a drain on the departments that have huge expenses.”

Although Milligan lamented the 1995 storms’ toll on the county, she said many agencies emerged better prepared to deal with future calamities.

“The advantage of having gone through a previous disaster is that county departments become very used to working with each other,” Milligan said. “Unfortunately, we have to go through disasters to end up with experiences like that.”