Bright Spots on a Rainy Day

They are the heavy lifters during heavy weather, the people who make our schools, roads and utilities run even as the rest of us pause to watch the skies unload a torrent of rain.

The patrol officer was on the highway at 6 a.m. The elementary school opened on time at 8 a.m. People without power got it back by 11 a.m. Here are three scenes from Orange County at work on a sodden Tuesday.

Class Acts Keep School Running Smoothly

Forget El Nino. Let’s talk about los ninos and how a principal, a teacher and a custodian coped at Frank N. Eastwood Elementary School on a day when the puddles were so deep and the rain so thick that they couldn’t run a flag up the pole.

For Jill Sloan, principal of this school in Westminster, where the mascot, fittingly, is the dolphin, the downpour meant paying extra care to the little things that could keep her 600-plus students warm, dry and learning.

“This is the heaviest day of the year,” said Sloan, who put off a management meeting to attend to the rain. “We have a couple of areas that tend to flood, so we have sandbags.”

The bags formed makeshift footbridges on walkways, near the teachers’ lounge and outside classrooms--wherever puddles turned into mini-swamps. Naturally, some kids preferred the wet route.

“Stay on the sandbags,” Sloan called out as a laughing, rambunctious class trooped by. “Then you’ll keep your feet dry.”

On the whole, Eastwood weathered well. It has no leaky roofs, Sloan said. There is a multipurpose room for indoor dining, a luxury some schools lack. About the only trouble a visitor could see was an overtaxed drainage system and some bursting roof gutters.

For Tom Blankenship, the second-grade teacher in Room 3, rain meant rejiggering his lessons to account for restless students. “They seem to be a little more hyper, and they have a hard time settling in,” he said. “The rain excites them as well.”

So out went the story he planned to read. In were work sheets and indoor games.

During the morning recess, when students would normally go outside for 10 minutes, Blankenship pulled out a large inflatable plastic ball decorated with math problems for students to toss in a circle. At lunchtime he planned to keep his room open for students to play games or watch educational videos.

The kids were emphatically pro-rain.

“I like it. I get to splash my big boots in it,” said John Hunsaker, 7, who showed off his yellow rubber shoes.

Perhaps the hardest worker was Lonnie Sampson, for eight years a custodian here. He was moving sandbags back and forth and fending off water and mud with a broom as best he could.

“This is the worst I’ve seen in a long time,” he said. The toughest work would start after school. “The kids, you know how they like to splash and track mud,” Sampson said with a smile. “It’s just a bigger mess everywhere.”

Trouble-Shooter Is a Real Power Player

Don Wood wasn’t surprised when the phone rang Tuesday at 5 a.m. at his home in Trabuco Canyon. At 41, he’s worked for Southern California Edison Co. for 20 years. When the weather gets foul, so do the hours he gets called.

“This is what we do,” said the Edison trouble-shooter, whose job includes fixing power outages. “The weather relates to everything.”

Wood shook himself awake and got to work by 6:15.

“This is what we live in,” he said, referring to the bright yellow raincoat that was his uniform for the day.

Wood’s truck, a heavy-duty vehicle topped by an elevator bucket, was outfitted with a cellular phone, two-way radio and a cabinet full of diagrams showing major electrical power circuits countywide. Tucked behind the passenger seat were several disposable urine bags for use in certain emergencies.

“You never know where you’ll be,” Wood said.

On this day, it seemed for a while that he might not be anywhere besides a doughnut shop awaiting calls. The first came in about 10:40 a.m. A power outage affecting 921 customers had occurred around Orange and Tustin. Quick as a flash flood, Wood was en route.

“Sometimes you start out slow, then it’s just job after job,” he said.

The problem: a power line downed by a tree branch. Wood determined which circuits were affected and how to circumvent them. After radioing his findings to a dispatcher, he sidled up to a pole, climbed it with a ladder from his truck and pulled open a metal lever.

Swoosh--power restored to more than 500 customers. Repeating the action at a second pole, he instantly gave electricity back to a few hundred more, including two schools. Finally, returning to the downed wire, Wood measured its length and called for a crew to come for repairs.

The outcome: power restored in less than half an hour to all but 100 customers. They got it back after three hours.

Wood says he routinely works up to 32 hours straight during inclement weather. Once he worked nonstop for a week. “When a storm comes through,” he says, “there is no such thing as Christmas, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving or birthdays.”

Wet Freeways Equal Long Day for Officer

With the pavement still dry and a pink sunrise peeking through the clouds, California Highway Patrol Officer Mike Campbell could afford to be optimistic as he began his 6 a.m. shift in Santa Ana.

“I just hope people slow down and that nobody gets hurt,” he said as he started his patrol of the Riverside Freeway. Soon, though, the rain swept in, scattering puddles to trap unwary or unlucky drivers.

One of them caught Debra Cattani, 38, of Riverside, at 7:30 a.m. in Yorba Linda. She was already having a bad day, on her way to see an IRS auditor, when her 1997 Toyota Avalon hydroplaned and skidded down a 30-foot embankment.

“God, I look like a freight train hit me,’ she said as she dabbed a bruise on her forehead. “Good thing I’ve got car insurance.”

“Yes it is. Do you have that with you?” Campbell said.

The rain made Campbell, 29, of Garden Grove, trade his Harley-Davidson motorcycle for a Chevrolet Caprice patrol car as he went from crash to crash to crash, taking reports. Such downpours make work hectic for him and the roads hazardous, he said. But he said he feels most anxious for the tow-truck drivers, like the one who survived a terrifying roadside incident in Anaheim.

Campbell heard the tale after he arrived at the scene:

A Ford Explorer exiting the Riverside Freeway had hit a puddle and spun three times, whacking the guardrail before coming to rest.

A roll-back tow truck arrived and the driver began tending to the Explorer. But then a Toyota Corolla came along the same path, skidded on the water, spun and slammed into the Explorer.

The impact knocked the Explorer into the tow-truck driver and sent him flying 10 feet to the side of the road. Incredibly, he escaped with bumps and bruises.

Meanwhile, the Toyota zoomed up a ramp onto the back of the tow truck and came to rest with its two left wheels dangling over the side.

“I liked the rain until today,” said tow driver Brian SamFilippo, 26, of Yorba Linda. “I’m just glad I’m alive.”

Said Campbell: “We’ve had an officer get hurt already, and a tow-truck driver gets hurt. This is getting to be ridiculous now.”

The officer headed back to the CHP station in Santa Ana at the end of his eight-hour shift. As they had all day, impatient drivers hurtled by on slick roads.

“On rainy days, just because it says 65 doesn’t mean you have to go 65,” Campbell said. “Watch your speed, slow down and keep your space between you and the guy ahead of you. You never know where that patch of water might be.”