It’s a Year Since Brutal Storms Did Their Damage, but Some Repairs Are Still Undone : A Wet Winter’s Memories Come Flooding Back

The view from the Marine Room was chilling.

Kelly Boyd peered outside his tavern and saw a raging river of muddy water covering Ocean Avenue. “It was a good three feet high,” he recalled.

The day before, Boyd and other merchants had frantically boarded up and sandbagged their storefronts. “We had water and silt come in under the door 20 feet inside, but it was minimal damage. We were prepared, others weren’t.”

Now, a year after brutal back-to-back storms brought death, mudslides and more than $55 million in damage to Orange County, officials and others are frustrated that federal disaster money for repair work to protect the county against another storm is slow in coming.

Officials point out that work is progressing to fix flood channels and roads damaged in 1995. However, the county’s $1.64-billion bankruptcy and the lack of promised federal emergency repair funds have been a handicap.

“We have done all the critical repairs,” said Tom Connelie, a county manager of public works operations. “But some projects have stalled because we are waiting on FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] money.”

Bill Barnes, a Dana Point resident and surfer, is discouraged that his efforts to solve pollution problems at the San Juan Creek mouth have gotten nowhere because county officials have been distracted by the bankruptcy.

Barnes had helped form a task force of elected officials and numerous agencies to examine how to stop bacterial pollution from reaching the river mouth, a problem that has caused area beaches to be closed because of the health risk to swimmers.

But the task force abruptly stopped meeting in early 1995 and lost momentum because of the bankruptcy. Now, county officials are talking about merging the San Juan Creek and Aliso Creek task forces because they are in the same watershed area.

“When the county went bankrupt,” Barnes said, “that left me and the task force up in the air with nowhere to go.”

Barnes, a surfer from the Doheny Longboard Surfing Assn., has lobbied to restore the creek’s wetlands and create a natural filtration system. The plan has gained interest, but lack of progress means another year of beach closures at Doheny because of dangerous bacteria levels.

Larry Paul, the county’s manager of coastal facilities, is more optimistic.

The task forces are “not dead,” he said. “They just took a hiatus.” Meanwhile, vital flood control repairs such as at Fullerton Creek in Buena Park have been completed, but other, less critical repairs have suffered because only $4 million out of $20 million in claims has been reimbursed to the county by FEMA, said William Zaun, the county’s public works director.

Zaun and other public works officials are confident the county’s flood control system is in “pretty good shape” to withstand another rainy season.

But it hasn’t helped that money for repairs is tight, according to Zaun and Connelie. The county’s flood control district last year scrambled to find $3 million that was not budgeted to pay for limited repairs, Connelie said.

Permanent repairs to 18 of the most critically damaged flood control channels have been made, according to officials. But 27 others that suffered lesser damage have not been fixed because of funding problems.

The biggest channel to be hit by the big storm was on a mile-long section of Fullerton Creek Channel in Buena Park, where the channel’s 20-foot-tall concrete lining “peeled away like a banana,” said Fred Egeler, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokesman.

In another significant problem, funding from Orange County has not yet been found to enlarge Prado Dam, corps officials said.

The dam, located in Riverside County, provides flood control for the entire Santa Ana River Basin. Currently, it is designed to protect Orange County against a 70-year flood event, but plans are to increase its size to withstand a 190-year flood event. Orange County’s costs for the flood project are $502 million.

Prado’s enlargement is part of a five-year, $1.3-billion Santa Ana River Flood Control Project. The corps plans to elevate Prado from 566 to 594.4 feet, which will increase the reservoir capacity from 212,000 to 362,000 acre-feet.

In San Juan Capistrano, emergency work to San Juan Creek east of Interstate 5 repaired a huge section of its banks, pummeled by last year’s rains, which also damaged city sewer lines and a bike path and nearly undermined a freeway overpass south of Ortega Highway.

Creek sandbars created over the years dangerously diverted heavy runoff that scoured the creek, chewing 200 feet of embankment along an 1,800-foot section.

But San Juan Capistrano also had to contend with FEMA. Of $800,000 in claims for creek repair, FEMA so far has approved only $350,000.

In Aliso Creek, rock has been put in place to protect sewer pipelines from rain runoff in an upstream area near Aliso Creek Road and Alicia Parkway near Laguna Niguel, said William Becker, general manager of the Aliso Water Management Agency.

Becker said he was confident that the project could start in May.

In Laguna Beach, downtown was hardest hit after the city’s 10-foot-deep storm viaduct overflowed, sending a three-foot wall of muddy water down Ocean Avenue.

Slides damaged three homes and flooding knocked out telephone service after flood waters slammed into the GTE building moments after employees were evacuated. In addition, the raging water also tore away about 100 feet of the city’s boardwalk and seriously eroded the shore.

“The problem last year was twofold,” said City Manager Kenneth C. Frank. “We had a lot of rain in a relatively short period of time.”

Laguna Beach has claimed that tons of mud from grading of the toll road by the Orange County Transportation Agency was washed down Laguna Canyon Road and ended up clogging some of the city’s storm drains.

The city has filed a lawsuit seeking $675,000 from the San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor Agency, which also was named as a defendant in a $5-million lawsuit filed by residents and business owners along Laguna Canyon Road.

“We don’t expect it to happen again,” said Frank, citing construction by the corridor agency of large earthen basins to contain runoff.