Many Scramble for Higher, Drier Ground

It was the most powerful punch of winter, a hard-charging Pacific storm that barreled across Ventura County on Tuesday with the kind of reckless force that causes folks to take stock of why they live here.

Some stood their ground, choosing to do battle with the driving rain, bone-chilling gusts and mud that flowed onto roads and down hillsides like thick cakes of lava.

Others were sent scrambling for higher--or at least drier--ground, admitting that they were no match for the rising rivers and swollen streams that kept flood control workers busy and rescue teams on the alert most of the day.

Today, residents will begin tackling the soggy job of mopping up after the storm, of digging out from a deluge that lived up to its promise to pound the county. And in this El Nino winter, they will prepare for the next downpour to move in.

But they will also take stock, pleased to have survived a harrowing day of oozing mud and rain-soaked streets.

“It’s been long, it’s been trying, thank God it hasn’t been a disaster,” said Ventura Mayor Jim Friedman, assessing the aftermath Tuesday evening. “It could have been.”

Road Woes

By midmorning, the Ventura River was raging at 19 feet above flood stage, inundating low-lying areas with torrents of milky brown water.

The Ventura RV park, on the banks of the river, almost disappeared under several feet of water as the river continued to rise.

“This is incredible, absolutely incredible,” said Carl Heisler of Ventura, who came down to the barricaded Main Street bridge to watch the roiling torrent.

The downpour came so fast and so hard that at one point, it unleashed tons of rock and mud onto the northbound lanes of the Ventura Freeway at the Ojai Freeway. The northbound lanes were closed until Tuesday evening, slowing and stranding hundreds of motorists.

“It’s amazing no one got hurt,” said Joe Luna, spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department. He said California Department of Transportation crews were on the way to repair the damage, but that the area was still too unstable to do anything.

Other major arteries fared just as poorly.

California 150 was closed at the Santa Barbara-Ventura county line.

And a four-mile stretch of California 118, between Somis and Moorpark, was shut down in both directions after one bridge was washed out and another was damaged by fierce torrents from two creeks that feed into the Arroyo Simi.

Caltrans officials are waiting for the water level to drop before they assess the damage. But they estimate that the highway will be closed from two weeks to two months.

The most serious damage occurred at the 20-foot bridge located where Somis Road meets California 118. The structure was washed out after receiving a pounding from the currents of Coyote Canyon Creek.

“The water level rose so high and the current was so violent that it undermined the banks of the river and our bridge has settled,” Caltrans spokesman Vincent Moreno said.

Swift-Water Rescue

It was one of the day’s most dramatic rescues.

Flushed out of his makeshift shelter at the bottom of the Santa Clara River near the Ventura-Oxnard border, Martin Frias found himself stuck on a sandbar with flood waters rising around him.

A passerby on the Ventura Freeway, who spotted the 59-year-old homeless man frantically waving his arms, alerted authorities as the rain-swollen river closed to within 2 feet of Frias.

A sheriff’s helicopter swooped down, hovering a few feet above the water. The rescue team reached out and pulled Frias, shivering and speechless, to safety. Moments later, the sandbar was engulfed by the churning current.

When the helicopter landed on Victoria Avenue, Frias--his Windbreaker, jeans and tennis shoes sopping wet--declined a ride to the hospital. He told the crew that he was fine and walked away.

“How he made it to that sandbar I couldn’t tell you,” Sheriff’s Deputy Tim Hagel said. “He would have been swept away if he hadn’t gotten anyone’s attention.”

At one point Tuesday, a rescue team had to navigate the fast-moving Ventura River near Casitas Springs to make sure that no one was trapped inside an abandoned car swept up in the rushing water.

And later, rescue workers from the Ventura County fire and sheriff’s departments scoured a wild Brown Barranca near the intersection of Telegraph Road and Nevada Avenue in Ventura after a woman reported seeing a small child floating downstream.

While authorities were unsure what the woman had seen, teams worked quickly to fix safety lines across the spilling arroyo to anchor rescuers against the 20-mph current.

“We’re going on the premise that what she saw was what she saw,” Sheriff’s Sgt. Chuck Buttell said. “We can’t take anything for granted until we have reason to believe otherwise.”

While normally just a dusty channel, the Brown Barranca has the potential of becoming dangerous quickly during heavy rains.

Fed from rainwater streaming into Long Canyon, the arroyo falls quickly downhill, giving water time to pick up tremendous speed before it flows out through a flat plain to the ocean.

Rescuers scrambled to attach the safety lines around two eucalyptus trees on each side of the muddy bank.

After about an hour struggling against mud, rain and time, two rescuers--sheathed in black neoprene and carrying long aluminum poles--waded into the water to investigate a steel strainer that authorities thought would have trapped a body before going down the channel.

Bracing themselves against more than 500 pounds of pressure rushing against their backs, they probed the debris collected at the strainer.

“This is really dangerous work,” Buttell said, pointing to the rescuers as they worked around the mass of logs, branches, bottles and tires.

After about 40 minutes, authorities decided to move their search downstream to where the arroyo spills down a narrow, rocky sluice.

Clawing their way through the thick brambles and wet weeds, they combed both banks for about a quarter of a mile, but found nothing.

Other searches downstream and a helicopter sweep up the arroyo also found little, except for a child’s bent and broken bicycle.

Authorities could not tell how long the bike had been there.

“We’ve looked clear down to the ocean and still haven’t found anything, so we’re going to suspend the search until we receive a report of a missing person,” Sheriff’s Sgt. Earl Matthews said.

Surging Flood Waters

In the east end of the Ojai Valley, 10 to 15 homes were damaged when a retaining wall collapsed behind two houses on Avenida de la Vereda, sending muddy flood waters streaming into the small neighborhood.

“There is a flood channel where the water is supposed to go,” said Capt. John Alford of the Ventura County Fire Department. “But it made its own channel.”

Damage estimates were not immediately available. As residents calculated their losses, emergency crews with the California Department of Forestry filled more than 1,000 sandbags to dam the surging waters.

Standing outside her flooded home, Kelly White said she started to worry about the torrential rain in the predawn hours Tuesday.

“Usually when it starts raining like this, I check the floor of the garage,” she said. “At 5 a.m., already there was 3 feet of water.”

Chris Roe and her husband, Ted, bought their Avenida de la Vereda home in 1966 and have spent the past three decades--since the 1969 floods--urging the county flood control department to take more aggressive steps to divert flood waters, she said.

“We’ve been begging the county for help,” said Roe, who estimated her personal losses in the “tens of thousands of dollars.”

Battered Landmark

The Hueneme Pier was weathering the weekend’s storms until Monday night, when the latest storm shifted direction to the west. By 7 a.m. Tuesday, the pier started losing pieces of wood.

The westward T-section of the pier broke off in two giant slabs--one of which washed up on rocks at Hueneme Harbor. The whereabouts of the rest of the structure remain unknown.

Only a handful of residents came out to brave the high winds and hard rains to get a look at the shortened structure.

Bruce Williams, who operates Port Hueneme Sports Fishing near the pier, said he was going to wait awhile before seeing the damage for himself. And he said he worries how long it will take for bureaucrats to decide that the pier is a landmark and should be rebuilt.

“It becomes this government boondoggle, where the politicians will be driving around in their limousines figuring out whether they should rebuild it or not,” Williams said.

The waterfront veteran said he wasn’t surprised by the intensity of Tuesday’s storm. In fact, he said he figured that the county was due for a strong winter blast.

“We probably haven’t had a good storm since the last time the pier got knocked out,” he said. “I suppose when parts start falling, it’s indicative of large, powerful swells.”

Headed for Higher Ground An estimated 40 people were evacuated from a 24-unit apartment building and eight homes Tuesday morning in west Ventura when thick mud and vegetation began sliding down the sodden hillside behind the residences, said Rick Achee, assistant Ventura fire chief.

Cindy Sullivan, 15, said she knew that it was time to flee her family’s apartment when she looked out a window and saw a sapling more than 5 feet high slip down the steep cliff, which is several hundred feet high.

“It’s pretty scary,” she said at a Red Cross evacuation center at Westpark Recreation Center. “You can see the cliff moving.”

Only Cindy and the four other members of her family had turned up at the center by late afternoon, with most other evacuees choosing to rent a motel room or stay with friends and relatives.

No damage to any homes was reported, although authorities closed part of Kellogg and Cedar streets for several hours Tuesday to clear several inches of oozing mud from the street.

The hillside has a history of mudslides during major rain storms, Achee said.

“This isn’t supposed to be happening, I just moved here,” Kellogg resident Lindsey Robbins, 20, said as she surveyed the liquid mud that intermittently cascaded down the hill. “Our next-door neighbor said in 1995 there was four feet of mud on this street.”

Late in the afternoon, authorities were still trying to secure a geologist to assess the hillside’s stability before they allowed residents back into their homes.

In Port Hueneme, Yolanda Anguiano was among those forced from their homes as flood waters battered a one-story apartment complex along Surfside Drive, about a block from the beach.

After waking up to a flooded apartment, she said she immediately picked up the phone to call 911, but the line was dead.

Clothing, shoes, makeup, groceries bought only the night before and garbage from the garage floated freely through Anguiano’s apartment, while the toilets added more water from nonstop overflowing.

“I had no idea how bad it was, but when I heard about the pier, then I knew it was a nightmare,” said Anguiano, who joined about 30 other displaced residents at a makeshift shelter at Huemene High School. “It’s very scary--you’re looking at your things, knowing when you come back nothing will be the same.”

*

Times staff writers Tracy Wilson and Chris Chi contributed to this story, along with correspondents Nick Green, Troy Heie, Dawn Hobbs, Regina Hong and Coll Metcalfe.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

County Rainfall

Here are rainfall figures from the Ventura County Flood Control Department for the 24-hour period ending at 6 p.m. Tuesday . Oct. 1 is the beginning of the official rain year.

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Rainfall Rainfall Rainfall Normal rainfall Location last 24 hours since Sunday since Oct. 1 to date Camarillo 2.56 4.49 15.55 7.54 Casitas Dam 2.40 7.87 24.64 12.97 Casitas Rec. 3.90 9.45 25.54 12.87 Center Fillmore 3.62 5.79 20.13 10.52 Matilija Dam 3.03 8.98 25.31 14.53 Moorpark 1.93 3.15 15.19 8.16 Ojai 3.11 6.50 20.16 11.58 Upper Ojai 4.96 10.55 22.24 12.42 Oxnard 2.52 4.06 18.33 7.98 Piru 1.54 2.91 15.22 9.49 Port Hueneme 3.58 6.85 18.31 7.85 Santa Paula 2.05 4.69 17.04 9.71 Simi Valley 1.22 2.09 16.32 7.82 Thousand Oaks 3.50 4.72 15.54 8.42 Ventura Govt. 4.25 7.64 21.35 8.83 Center

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Ventura County Storm Damage

1. Upper Matillja Canyon: Heaviest rainfalls, 11 inches since the storm began, funneling runoff into swollen Ojai Valley waterways.

2. Ojai: 10 to 15 homes flooded on Avenida del Recreo and Avenida de la Vereda.

3. Oak View: Several residents evacuated along Old Creek Road.

4. Ventura Avenue: About 100 Cedar Street apartment dwellers evacuated when hillside begins to slip.

5. Ventura Freeway: Key north-south expressway closed by mudslide and flood waters.

6. Saticoy: Crews search for boy reported to have fallen into barranca at Wells Avenue and Telegraph Road.

7. Santa Clara River: Sheriff’s helicopter crew rescues transient from sandbar.

8. Oxnard: Electrical transformer struck by lightning, blacking out 16,000 customers in Oxnard, Ventura and Fillmore.

9. Port Hueneme: Waves wash away 200 feet of Hueneme Pier.

10. Oxnard: Hueneme High School flooded.

11. Pacific Coast Highway: PCH closed by fallen trees at Pleasant Valley Road.

12. Oxnard Plain and Camarillo: Calleguas Creek overflows at Ventura Freeway, flooding 300 farm acres and partially flooding another 1,000. Crop damage at last $1 million.

13. Somis: Highway 118 closed in two places by flooding and bridge damage along Coyote Canyon and Long Canyon creeks.

14. Moorpark: Moorpark College closed by power outage.

15. Thousand Oaks: Sewage pipe breaks, sending waste in creeks at the rate of 250,000 gallons an hour.

16. Simi Valley: Officials monitor Arroyo Simi for possible flooding.

17. Camarillo: Railroad tracks washed out, halting service to Oxnard.

18. Port Hueneme: 14 oceanfront homes flooded, displacing 25 people.

* EL NINO’S FIRST WALLOP: State of emergency declared in city of Ventura. A1

Deluge shows vulnerability of the Ojai Valley. A1

* RELATED STORIES: B2-4