Season’s Worst Storm Wreaks Havoc in County

The largest storm of the season thundered through Ventura County on Tuesday, flooding about 30 dwellings in the Ojai Valley and Port Hueneme, shutting down school for 40,000 students and lashing the coast with gale-force winds that swept away 200 feet of the Hueneme Pier.

The spectacular thunderstorm dumped as much as 7 inches of rain on coastal areas and 11 inches in the Ojai mountains over two days, producing a nightmare of flooded roads, slipping hillsides, swamped fields and swollen waterways.

The Ventura River flooded at its mouth, washing onto the Ventura Freeway and combining with a massive mudslide to close the county’s main north-south roadway about 10 a.m. All lanes were clear by evening.

A woman reported seeing a young boy swept into a Saticoy barranca, but no youngster was reported missing or found by late evening.

A pipeline ruptured at a rain-gorged Thousand Oaks sewage plant, spilling millions of gallons of effluent into a hillside creek on its way to the ocean. Because of diluting rainwater, officials said the sewage posed no health hazard.

And as the county’s main roadways closed one after another due to mudslides, flooding or collapsed bridges, Metrolink canceled commuter service at the Oxnard Station because a track washed out in Camarillo.

The city of Ventura and the county Board of Supervisors declared a local state of emergency, a prerequisite for state and federal assistance.

With two nasty storms bashing California, 14 counties declared local emergencies, as hundreds of residents fled fast-rising rivers in the north and torrential rains created havoc in the Southland.

“It was not a disaster,” said Sandi Wells, spokeswoman for the Ventura County Fire Department. “But we had glimpses of the nightmare that could have been.”

The storm abated by afternoon, but officials warned that residents should be ready for another set of downpours over the weekend.

“Make sure your drains are clean and your sandbags ready, because we aren’t kidding,” Wells said. “This is just the beginning of what we’ve been warned about all winter. El Nino does exist.”

As gray skies brightened, farmers scoured their flooded fields for damage: Early estimates were at least $1 million in crop damage from a Calleguas Creek overflow near Camarillo. About 250 to 300 acres of farmland were submerged and 1,000 partially flooded, officials said.

Schools Closed

In dramatic style, a sheriff’s helicopter team snatched a transient from a sandbar in the rushing Santa Clara River--but the county’s largest river remained far below flood stage all day.

Schools in western Ventura County--including those in Ventura, Santa Paula, Ojai and the Oxnard High School District--were closed, leaving 40,000 kids at home. Hueneme High School classrooms were flooded. But no east county school district called off classes because of rain.

Ventura College canceled its evening classes. Moorpark College canceled classes all day because of a power loss, as did a nearby elementary school--two of numerous power outages that darkened the county as the storm peaked behind 50 mph winds before dawn.

A lightning bolt struck a house in downtown Oxnard, hurling chimney bricks 200 feet from the structure. Trees fell throughout the city, including three on top of cars resulting in minor injuries to occupants.

Winds toppled eight power poles in soggy soil along Hueneme Road in Oxnard and there were dozens of street closures due to rockslides, wind-blown debris and curb-to-curb flooding, said Sheriff’s Sgt. Chuck Buttell.

“It’s pretty grim. This is the heaviest weather I’ve ever seen,” Buttell said.

Residents Evacuated

Lightning struck a transformer in Oxnard about 3:30 a.m., cutting electrical service for many hours to 16,000 customers in Oxnard, Ventura and Fillmore, including Ventura City Hall.

The lack of power kept Ventura emergency crews from pumping runoff water through flood control channels and led to street flooding in several parts of the city--especially the Avenue area and the Four Points resort at Ventura Harbor.

About 40 people were evacuated from a Cedar Avenue apartment complex and houses nearby as the hillside behind began to move Tuesday morning.

There was so much minor road and house flooding in Ventura that officials said they could not tally it all. Virtually every major street in the city had access problems sometime during the day.

“There’s extensive flooding on the Avenue and it went into some homes,” city spokeswoman Debbie Solomon said. “Flooding is so extensive here that we’re responding right now,” she said in late morning, hours after the peak of the storm.

Nonetheless, there was apparently no loss of human life and no serious injuries related to the storm, authorities said.

And officials said this blustery storm--which deposited half the season’s rain total in just two days--was notable partly because it was not as bad as feared.

Unlike the deadly floods of 1992 and 1995, the damage from this one was relatively light mostly because of a 24-hour break between heavy rains early Monday and downpours early Tuesday.

“We’ve had a couple of good storms and they’ve been spaced so we had time to recover,” said meteorologist Gary Ryan of the National Weather Service’s Oxnard office. “The creeks and streams of Ventura County are generally very flashy; they’re up and down very quickly. So this break between storms was just enough. We’re lucky.”

As it was, the creekside communities of the Ojai Valley bore the brunt of the storm early Tuesday morning.

Ten to 15 homes in east Ojai were flooded when a 7-foot-high concrete retaining wall broke about 5:30 a.m. and a stream feeding Thacher Creek rushed into the small, tract houses. Two were badly damaged.

“This is where our back room was,” said Chris Roe, pointing to a collapsed roof as she slapped through ankle-deep water in her house. The torrent was so strong that it washed Roe’s patio furniture and clothes dryer into the street.

The beachfront hamlet of Port Hueneme also suffered in this storm when 14 apartments in the Surfside complex were flooded knee-deep by Bubbling Springs Creek. The creek usually drains into the ocean, but the ocean’s high tide pushed the runoff back.

Yolanda Anguiano was the first of 25 residents to be evacuated to Hueneme High School gym for safety.

“I woke up this morning because my foot was cold and when I got up out of bed my apartment was flooded,” Anguiano said, drying out in the school’s lobby.

“I had no idea how bad it was, but when I heard about the pier, then I knew it was a nightmare,” she said. “It’s very scary--you’re looking at your things, knowing when you come back nothing will be the same.”

The Hueneme Pier was T-shaped before 1995, when it lost its left arm to powerful storms. It’s now I-shaped after losing its right arm to pounding surf Tuesday. Officials estimate repairs will cost about $650,000.

On Monday, the pier weathered the storm nicely until about 10 p.m. Then the surf shifted directions and came straight from the west, said Denis Murrin, city facility manager.

By 7 a.m. Tuesday, it was losing pieces of wood.

“A little after 8 a.m. the waves carried away about 200 feet of the pier and headed westward,” Murrin said. “The remaining part of the pier appears to be OK.”

Meanwhile, the Ventura Pier, which had lost seven pilings to crushing waves since Friday, apparently sustained no new damage.

While western Ventura County reeled under the force of the storm, the east county emerged relatively unscathed, except for the sewage leak at the Hill Canyon plant in Thousand Oaks and the closure of California 118 near Moorpark for at least two weeks.

The rains turned the Arroyo Simi flood control channel into a roiling river from Simi Valley to Camarillo, but Ventura County Flood Control officials said there was no significant flooding or damage from the storms.

In Simi Valley, about 1,900 residents were without power for about 45 minutes before noon. A telephone pole fell down on north Tapo Canyon Road, but did not cause any damage.

“It’s kind of eerie, but there aren’t really any trouble spots,” said Randy White, who coordinates emergency services for the city Police Department. “We just had the usual flooding of some intersections, but nothing significant.”

At Moorpark’s Whitaker Hardware store on High Street, residents snatched up tarps, sandbags, roof cement and rain gear Tuesday. But this is something they have done for months after listening to a barrage of stories about El Nino, said store owner Dale Whitaker. “They’ve all been waiting with bated breath for something to happen,” he said.

As it was, severe weather struck across the state Monday night and Tuesday.

A huge Northern California storm was blamed for one death, in San Mateo County, where a man was killed when a tree slammed into his house.

Southern California authorities reported no fatalities, but twin 12-year-old boys barely escaped injury when an elm tree crashed through the window of their Hancock Park bedroom, showering them with glass.

Winds Wreak Havoc

Meanwhile, power outages left thousands of people in the dark at least sporadically throughout the day. Some 187,000 customers were affected in the Bay Area, along with at least 114,000 in Southern California.

The Sepulveda Dam came within 7 feet of flood levels, and the normally barren Los Angeles River coursed with muddy water--so much that officials declared certain sections of it running at 75% capacity.

And ferocious winds ripped part of the roof from an eight-unit building at the San Fernando Gardens public housing complex in Pacoima. No one was injured, but several felt like they had just lived through a scene from “The Wizard of Oz.”

“The roof just flew off. It was a really loud noise,” said Ramon Medina, 23, who lives in one of the damaged apartments. “It kind of shook the building. It was pretty bad.”

That same wind whipped up 15-foot waves all along the coast. A recorded surf report at Malibu lifeguard headquarters described it this way: “Beautiful to watch, no way you can get out there.”

In fact, there was no way to get many places in California on Tuesday.

There were SigAlerts and road closures galore. And if clogged roads weren’t frustrating enough (“Traffic on the 80 is backed up all the way to Missouri,” one frazzled traffic reporter blurted during San Francisco’s morning rush hour), public transportation was slowed or even halted across much of the state.

Planes, Trains Stalled

Amtrak canceled service from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara and Oakland until further notice. Metrolink routed commuters onto buses north of Moorpark to avoid flooded tracks, and will likely do the same today. Union Pacific shut down its operations in Ventura County.

And several flights out of Los Angeles International Airport were delayed--not because the runways were flooded, but because passengers and flight crews couldn’t make it to the terminals, due to impossible gridlock on surrounding streets.

Though airport officials reported no other problems, a passenger on one flight from Cincinnati reported feeling a “tremendous jolt” as the plane approached LAX--which the pilot described as a lightning strike.

“When people stopped screaming, the pilot came on and said, ‘You can see we’re still in the air,’ ” said Laurel Stavis, who works as a news director for Dartmouth College.

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Tracy Wilson, Chris Chi, Kate Folmar and Stephanie Simon and correspondents Dawn Hobbs, Richard Warchol, Nick Green, Troy Heie, Coll Metcalfe and Cathy Murillo.

* SEWAGE SPILL: Broken pipe sends effluent into Conejo Creek. B1

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