Thousands Flee as Feather River Breaches Levees

Sodden levees holding back the straining Feather River began to fail late Thursday, prompting alarmed officials to order mandatory--and instant--nighttime evacuations of tens of thousands of residents from this Northern California city and others nearby.

The swollen Feather breached its levees in two spots near the farming towns of Olivehurst and Linda. But the discovery of water burbling through the levees near Yuba City and Marysville raised the greatest concern of a widespread break that could inundate a low-lying area of 50,000 people north of Sacramento.

Authorities drove through the streets of Yuba City after dark to spread the alarm. On radio, television and through blaring loudspeakers, residents were ordered to flee immediately, stopping only to grab blankets, medication and a change of clothes.

“I live two blocks from the river,” said Abdul Malik, scrambling into an emergency bus picking up evacuees who lacked transportation. “I don’t know if my house will be there but we got to go.”

By 10 p.m. the city was deserted except for police.

“They’re telling them just to get to high ground,” said Carl DeWing, a spokesman for the state Office of Emergency Services. If the saturated earthen levee collapses, “it would happen very fast,” DeWing said. “They want to give people time to get out while the getting is good.”

Earlier in the day, Gov. Pete Wilson declared weather emergencies in 26 counties as surging rivers washed out roads, swamped farmland, stranded motorists and forced residents to flee their homes. Across the state line in Nevada, logs floated past oddly silent casinos in downtown Reno, where the Truckee River burst its banks.

Flood waters covered the runway at Reno/Tahoe International Airport and cut off roads and rail access to the city. Flooding in the Carson Valley south of Reno shut down the Nevada state capital of Carson City.

The rain that has been pummeling California let up Thursday along the Russian River, giving relief to the beleaguered town of Guerneville, but the weather continued to wreak havoc elsewhere. An urban flood advisory was issued Thursday night for Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

Meanwhile, south of Lake Tahoe the Alpine County seat of Markleeville was virtually marooned. The warm snow-eating rain halted skiing at Mammoth Mountain, while several reservoirs swollen by runoff strained at maximum capacity. And both Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings Canyon National parks became inaccessible--if beautiful islands--as rising water washed out their main access roads but created new waterfalls.

The first California fatality of the storms was reported when Trinity County officials recovered the body of Robert Ryan, a Trinity Center resident whose car went off a bridge on New Year’s Eve. But three hikers missing on Mount Shasta since Dec. 26 were found safe and in good shape.

Flood fighters working through the night with flashlights were the first to spot the breaches, known as boils, that signaled trouble on the Feather River near Yuba City.

The find crushed local authorities who thought they had gotten through the roughest part of the floods in decent shape, DeWing said. “For a while, they thought they were over the hump,” he said.

But the overflow spilling from the Oroville dam at the rate of 115,000 cubic feet per second apparently weakened the levee and caused dangerous erosion, DeWing added.

As soon as they spotted the problem, workers set about trying to shore up the levee, while others continued to monitor the boils. Meanwhile, authorities plotted evacuation routes to higher ground at the Colusa or Yolo County Fairgrounds, or to the area around Chico.

‘Get Out of the Area.’

Earlier in the day, authorities ordered 15,000 people near Wilton south of Sacramento to evacuate as the serene Consumnes River jumped its banks and morphed into a flowing sea that swamped homes and ranches, swept across California 99 and forced closure of Interstate 5.

At one point, the river was measured at 19 feet--seven feet above flood level. “Evacuate immediately. Get out of the area,” Bob Thomas, the Sacramento County executive, urged in an afternoon television broadcast.

Two men who were trapped atop their car roofs near Wilton for more than a hour were rescued by a National Guard helicopter. The first victim, an elderly man, calmly latched on to the hoist lowered from the chopper. But the second man panicked and jumped into the roiling waters before the rescuer, state prison guard J.J. Moore, could fasten his harness. Moore managed to grab hold of the man anyway and dragged him to the nearest shore--where he promptly took off running.

“This is what we train for,” Moore said. “This is the game.”

Rescuers may have been ready, but the crisis took disaster officials by surprise. The “Pineapple Connection” off the Pacific that had pounded the region for a week had subsided in some areas by early Thursday. But even without fresh downpours, the rivers continued to rise, as runoff from earlier rain and melting snow gushed down from the mountains.

Just two days into January, the Northern California watershed had received fully 93% of its average rainfall total for the month--and there was no way the saturated ground could absorb it all. Thus the Consumnes, Feather, American and Sacramento rivers were all running at or above maximum capacity, leaving disaster officials hoping--”no, we’re frankly praying”--that the runoff will slow down, said Bill Draper, a spokesman for the joint state and federal flood center in Sacramento.

“The more water we have, the less control we have, and lately, we’ve been stretched right to the limit,” Draper added.

Rains Expected to Subside

Although another storm is lurking near Hawaii, ready to swing into California over the weekend, meteorologist Jon Erdman predicted only scattered, relatively light rainfall for the next few days. Cooler temperatures also should bring new snow to some parts of the Sierra.

“There will be hit-and-miss showers, but nothing like the intense rains they’ve been getting in the Sierras,” said Erdman of WeatherData Inc., which supplies forecasts for The Times. “It looks like things are finally winding down.”

Winding down for storm watchers, maybe--but not for disaster officials.

Draper said the web of rivers around Sacramento and into the San Joaquin Valley will be “of concern--and I mean serious concern--for at least another 48 to 72 hours,” or until the waterlogged mountains finish draining most of their runoff. “If the sun came out tomorrow, and it was a beautiful sunny day, we’d still have flood threats,” he said.

Amid the general gloom--and the pockets of sheer panic--there was some good news Thursday. The flooded Russian and Napa rivers through the wine country subsided, though edgy residents still had plenty of muck to clean out of their homes.

And in Yosemite, about 900 tourists who shunned a convoy out of the park Wednesday plucked a rainbow out of the washout, marveling at the spectacular waterfalls that appeared overnight.

“We are not having a flood,” concessions worker Chet Brooks said with a chuckle. “We are having an aquatic inconvenience with a beautiful upside.”

Still, park officials kept a wary eye on the weather. “We are asking all visitors to stay close to their rooms in case the flooding gets worse and we need to evacuate Yosemite Valley,” said Rick Smith of the National Park Service.

The storms were no joking matter for the authorities who regulate California’s dams. With reservoirs at or near maximum capacity, water officials anxiously debated how much water to release. As they well knew, they needed to spill water to preserve the reservoirs--but doing so could cause flooding or destruction downstream.

At Shasta Dam, federal officials released water at just half the rate it was flowing in, in hopes of easing pressure on the reservoir without overwhelming the Sacramento River.

“So far, it’s been doing pretty well,” said Lynnette Wirth, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

But with the water level creeping up above 95% of capacity in the reservoir, Wirth said officials will likely have to open the dam gates wider today, even at the risk of destroying some agricultural pumps, storage shacks and houseboats downstream.

The delicate task of determining how much water to hold and how much to release is as much art as science. Although satellite monitors help a bit, the primary technology for monitoring water flow is the human eye, water officials said.

Through the muck and the rain, observers trudge around watching the reservoirs, streams, dams and levees that are supposed to keep California in drinking water but out of floods. They search for telltale signs that a river is about to bust out of its channel--slow seepage, or bubbling geysers, or wind battering away at the soil along the banks.

Horror Stories

Another potential trouble spot was the Folsom Dam east of Sacramento. Just getting the gates open to let excess water spill out was quite a task since one of them had been deliberately jammed with giant logs during repairs.

With the pride of a grandma bragging about a precocious grandson, Wirth said that the dam appears to be holding its own, despite an extraordinarily heavy influx of water. “I call Folsom the little dam that could,” Wirth said.

Nonetheless, authorities continued to warily monitor Folsom, Shasta and the giant Oroville dam on the Feather River.

“We are looking at a very tense situation,” said David Kennedy, director of the state Department of Water Resources.

Damage from the storms has not yet been tallied, but horror stories already abound.

The town of Guerneville, on the Russian River, lost its only grocery store, as the local Safeway was flooded and will be closed indefinitely. Residents began the grim task of bailing out their homes Thursday as the flooding river withdrew.

“The important thing is to get in as quickly as possible and wash the walls down as quickly as possible after the water goes. If you let that slime stay on the walls, it gets just like glue,” retired trucker Bob Paxton said.

At King’s Sporting Goods and Tackle Store, owner Steve Jackson predicted that his business also will suffer even though he did not incur water damage.

“We’re right in the middle of our steelhead trout season,” he said. “We won’t be selling much fishing tackle now.” Most of the town’s resorts, he noted, had suffered heavy flood damage and would probably be closed for weeks or months.

Jackson blames upstream development for creating more runoff. “It used to be the 100-year flood. Then it became the 10-year flood. Now it is the every-other-year flood. It just keeps getting worse,” he said.

Elsewhere:

* The Klamath River overflowed and washed away the Golden Bears Casino in Del Norte County. “I would say everything inside the casino was destroyed,” Sheriff’s deputy Terry McNamara told Associated Press.

* Sliding mud, tumbling rocks and mysterious sinkholes damaged dozens of roads. Interstate 80 remained closed near the California-Nevada border, and Interstate 5 was blocked near Dunsmuir north of Redding.

* Nevada Gov. Bob Miller said the rains had caused “the most expensive flood damage we’ve ever had in northern Nevada.” The Truckee River, which flows out of Lake Tahoe, swallowed several blocks of downtown Reno--and closed the famed Mustang Ranch brothel--before beginning to recede Thursday night.

Some casinos managed to stay open, with die-hard gamblers still pulling the slot machines and plunking in coins as though nothing were amiss.

By late afternoon Thursday, authorities were expecting the river to crest at 15 feet above flood level, near its record of 17 feet in 1955. “I don’t think anybody wants to know what it would be like to break the record,” said city spokeswoman Mary Henderson. “We’ve got enough water.”

People across the Western United States could echo that sentiment. High water and mudslides have closed major roads in Idaho, Oregon and Washington. At least 15 deaths have been blamed on a nonstop string of storms that began Dec. 26, and damage has been estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars.

In Idaho, helicopters and planes were airlifting hundreds of people to safety after flooding and mudslides isolated small towns. “All these roads are in narrow river canyons, and there’s no place to go,” said Bill Dermody, a state transportation spokesman.

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Mark Arax in Fresno, Dave Lesher in Sacramento and Carla Hall in Los Angeles. Times researchers Nona Yates in Markleeville and Norma Kaufman in San Francisco, correspondents Martin Forstenzer in Bishop and Michael Ybarra in Reno and Associated Press also contributed.

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Trouble Spots

[1] Flooding washes away casino; body of storm victim is recovered.

[2] Missing Mt. Shasta hikers found alive and well; I-5 closed north of Redding.

[3] Flooding along Russian and Napa rivers begins to recede.

[4] Failing levee on Feather River forces major evacuation.

[5] Downtown Reno and airport inundated by Truckee River.

[6] Road closures strand hundreds of visitors in Yosemite Valley.

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Past Storms in Northern California

* December 1994 to January 1995

Damage: $63.6 million in storm-related public property damage

Deaths: Six deaths in Northern and Central California

Area: Disaster relief status is granted to 24 northern California counties.

****

January-February 1993

Damage: Flooding of the Russian and Napa rivers hits Sonoma County the hardest. It receives an estimated $4 million in damages to roads, bridges, businesses and homes.

Deaths: 0

Area: Disaster relief is granted to 22 counties and three cities in Northern California.

****

February 1986

Damage: After the rupture of the Yuba City levee, 19,000 residents of the cities of Linda and Olivehurst are evacuated. 12,335 homes are destroyed.

Deaths: 13

Area: Sonoma and Napa counties

****

December-January 1982

Damage: Hardest hit is Marin County, with a damage estimate of $100 million. Mudslides and flooding derail trains, destroy homes and block highways.

Deaths: 20

Area: Marin, San Mateo, Sonoma, Santa Cruz, Contra Costa and Humboldt counties are declared disaster areas.

Compiled by Times researcher Jacquelyn Cenacveira.