Victims Face Grim Cleanup as Floods Still Pose Threat

Grim-faced despite sparkling blue skies, tens of thousands of evacuees returned to their homes across Northern California on Sunday, finding hungry pets, ruined heirlooms, sodden sofas and carpets layered with mud from floods that have devastated a huge swath of the state since New Year’s Day.

Wielding brooms and hoses, the flood victims spent a long day mopping up what rain-swollen rivers had wrought over the past week--and somehow found time to marvel at the kindness of those who were spared.

“It’s a mess,” said Gay Rainey, standing amid a jumble of drying furniture in her Wilton home. Though flood waters had ruined possessions up to three feet, Rainey said the disaster renewed her faith in basic human goodness.

“People have just stopped by. People I don’t even know,” she said. “We are blessed. We are blessed.”

Elsewhere in the state, rivers continued to surge as dams upstream let water spill to make room in reservoirs for runoff still pouring down the mountains.

The high flows punched new holes in the maze of saturated earthen levees that mean the difference between dry land and disaster in many parts of the north state.

“For the most part, we are moving water safely through the system,” from dams to the vast Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, said Pete Weisser, a spokesman for the state-federal Flood Operations Center. “But the levees are soggy. It doesn’t take much to erode them right now.”

The tensest drama unfolded in Sutter County, where a blown levee surprised authorities and allowed a wall of water to roll toward the farm town of Meridian, 60 miles north of Sacramento.

Hoping to save the evacuated town, workers atop bulldozers frantically piled earth to create a protective dam on its southern flank. More than 50 homes were flooded when the levee first gave way, and a school and several hundred more houses were at risk.

By 9 p.m., the 8-foot-high dam was complete. Shaped like a horseshoe, it stretched for 3,500 feet and was topped by plastic sheeting anchored by sandbags.

“We sure hope it holds,” said Carl Adams, a spokesman for Sutter County’s Office of Emergency Services. “If it does not hold, Meridian gets wet.”

The flooding, California’s worst in a decade, has claimed five lives and caused a substantial but yet untallied amount of damage--an amount that may top the $1.8 billion in losses suffered in the storms of 1995. The number of evacuees--more than 100,000--is the most in any recorded state flood, the state Office of Emergency Services said.

Despite the sunny weather and falling levels in many rivers, 60,000 people remained evacuated Sunday, while many roadways and railroads needed extensive repairs before they could reopen.

Meanwhile, water managers cautioned that still more flooding could occur in the days to come.

“This particular flood event and the challenge to the levee system is far from over,” said Weisser, the flood center spokesman.

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Among other developments Sunday:

* Nearly 200 people were forced to flee waters that surged through multiple levee breaks near Vernalis, where the Stanislaus and San Joaquin rivers meet. As the waters swept over roads, residents scrambled to pack furniture into trucks while farmhands whistled at herds of cattle, hustling them up the ramps of trailers that would take them to higher ground.

Tomato farmers Aaron and Carol Miller were among those in the path of the flood. Working in the predawn darkness Sunday, they had brought in truckloads of gravel to shore up a levee bordering their 1,500-acre spread. But by 6 a.m., Carol Miller realized their work was in vain.

“I looked to where the sun was coming up and it was pure white,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Aaron, what is that?’ He said, ‘Oh [shoot].’ It was the sun glinting off the whitewater” gushing through a gaping hole in the levee they had worked so hard to reinforce.

By dusk the flood had submerged more than half the Millers’ ranch and was rolling ominously toward their home.

* Worries were escalating in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where the high water level and tides threatened to buckle levees, possibly flooding several small towns and portions of Stockton. Workers mounded rock and dirt against embankments that appeared to be weakening, and mandatory evacuation orders were enforced in the delta hamlets of Walnut Grove and Tyler Island.

“With the flows and the tides, it could be quite a devastating mix there,” said Pat Hill, a spokesman at the state Office of Emergency Services. High winds were exacerbating the problem by creating eddies and waves that fuel erosion.

* A team of 45 doctors and nurses were flown into the region by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to treat flood victims. Joined by volunteer doctors from area hospitals, they visited shelters to treat people for hypothermia, emotional problems and exposure to raw sewage. Another 1,000 elderly and ill flood victims were being treated for preexisting medical troubles.

* About 50,000 people returned to their homes in Yuba City and Marysville as a mandatory evacuation order was downgraded to a voluntary order. These residents--who live in a precarious place where the Feather and Yuba rivers join--were among the lucky ones, as most found their homes untouched by floods.

“The people are wonderful--very thankful,” said Dan McVey, a Sutter County spokesman. “Only a few of them have cussed us out for messing up their weekend.”

* In Nevada, Gov. Bob Miller estimated up to 2,000 homes have been flooded since New Year’s Day in Reno, Yerington and parts of Douglas County. Yerington remained cut off, with only a 10-block area above water, said Nevada Assembly Speaker Joe Dini, a Yerington resident.

“I think we’re looking at a quarter-billion to a half-billion dollars in total damages,” Miller said.

* One day after President Clinton issued a disaster declaration for 37 California counties, FEMA chief James Lee Witt began a helicopter tour of the storm-ravaged West Sunday.

“On behalf of President Clinton, our hearts and prayers go out to the victims across the West,” Witt said. “It’s hard to lose things you worked your whole life for. We are your partner and we want to help your communities rebuild.”

In some parts of Northern California, rebuilding--or at least the first stages of it--began in earnest Sunday. In Modesto, evacuees from a neighborhood bordering the Tuolumne River returned home and found that the landscape no longer made sense.

Instead of quiet streets, the pastel homes lined a rippling canal. Instead of grassy backyards, there was only the smooth brown plane of the river sliding slowly past, trees jutting up through it like crooked wraiths.

“The police asked me what my address was,” said Efthina Newell. “I told them 1329 Tuolumne River. They looked at me and I said I was just kidding. What can you do? I have to make a little bit light of it rather than cry all day long.”

Inside lay $8,000 worth of brand-new furniture and once-bright rugs ruined by river muck.

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A few streets away, Shari Maldonado--clad in hip waders--spent much of Sunday mucking out her garage. She and husband James Johnson returned home to find their cat on their roof, their tub full of mud, and their bed askew on soiled carpets.

Taking squishy steps across their living room, where the water had stained everything up to 2 1/2 feet off the floor, they talked of giving up and walking away from the mortgage.

“I don’t know if we’ll be back,” Johnson said. “We had [the house] up for sale for a month. But now no one will want it. They’ll say, ‘Hey, that’s the neighborhood that flooded.’ ”

Despite the flood’s devastation, most of its victims--in Modesto and elsewhere--seemed to shoulder the weight in good spirits. They dragged soggy belongings onto their front lawns to dry in the sun and joked to visitors, “Don’t track mud on the carpets!”

They thanked God aloud that no one was hurt and that some were able to truck out valuables before flood waters peaked. And they expressed thanks to police for giving them advance warnings to evacuate, and to strangers who pitched in.

In the town of Wilton, about 15 miles southeast of the state capital, the atmosphere was like an old-time barn raising, with neighbors helping to secure fences, shovel mud and cook food for those who no longer had kitchens that worked.

A local school opened an emergency center to distribute clothes and canned goods to flood victims. On a bulletin board outside, a sign read “Wilton Flood, Neighbors Helping Neighbors.” Volunteers signed a list offering help--like a muddy corral for animals or housing for evacuees.

Several blocks away, the Wilton Fire Protection District turned its headquarters into a clearinghouse for other kinds of relief, from how to test well water for contamination to removing hazardous materials.

Jan Warren was amazed at the outpouring of goodwill, noting that one woman drove from Placerville--at least 40 miles away--to deliver drinkable water.

Margaret Duarte of the small dairy town of Franklin, not far from Wilton, was sure she would lose her home and dairy to the flooding waters of the Cosumnes River. The house was flooded, but neighbors got the dairy cows to safety in a milking barn where they could be milked.

Though the cows are stressed and will not produce at normal levels for months, Duarte prefers to talk about the help that came her way.

“Out of every tragedy there always seems to be something good that happens afterward,” she said. “Maybe it’s God’s way to show us what’s really important.”

Times staff writer Mack Reed in Modesto contributed to this story.

* WHICH KIND OF WILD RIVER?

Purists detest dams, but these scenes aren’t the stuff of Sierra Club calendars. A3