Cleaning Up and Fessing Up

Two teenage girls who nearly drowned in the surging Bull Creek flood channel hugged their Fire Department rescuers Wednesday and offered a self-deprecating explanation for how they wound up in the water: They weren’t playing with a full deck.

Between giggles and blushes, Megan Cole, 13, of Granada Hills and her best friend, Jennifer Simpson, 14, of Sunland told a throng of reporters at the Los Angeles Fire Department Air Operations base at Van Nuys Airport that they were taking a walk in North Hills when they saw the raging flood channel.

“We thought since we were so close we might as well, like, stick our feet in the water. . . . It looked like chocolate milk,” said Megan, who was wearing tennis shoes inscribed with the words: “Life” and “Death.”

“You can tell we’re not brilliant,” said Megan.

The girls said they had heard warnings about the dangers of flood control channels, but ignored them.

“I had seen people who had, like, like, gone in the water and couldn’t get out--but I was just, like, I can swim,” Megan said. “We don’t have good reasoning skills.”

Taking off her shoes, Jennifer sat on the inclined flood channel wall, dipped her feet in the water and fell in. Megan quickly went in after her friend.

“She thought she could help me, but it kinda just didn’t work,” said Jennifer.

Firefighters said the water was only about four feet deep, but it was flowing at about 20 mph, strong enough to knock Jennifer and Megan off their feet. They never regained their footing as they were swept along the channel.

At that point, Jennifer said, one thought went through her mind: “I knew I shouldn’t be on my knees, because my knees are delicate.”

Though neither believed they could be heard over the roaring current, the girls said they cried out for help. A passing motorist spotted them, dialed 911 on his cellular phone and followed them by driving from overpass to overpass until firefighters arrived.

Megan said she was “totally grateful” to the motorist and wishes she knew who it was.

“Oh my God, it’s just, like, so amazing that this guy saved me,” Jennifer said. “If I had seen two girls in the water I probably would’ve kept driving.”

Los Angeles firefighters said they found Jennifer straddling an overpass support about two miles downstream from the point where they entered the water. Even farther along the creek rescuers in Fire Department helicopter spotted Megan waving her arms above the roiling waters.

With his Fire Department chopper parked behind him, pilot Paul Shakstad, 51, said he could not immediately descend to save the girl for fear of tangling the propeller blades in nearby power lines. So Shakstad pulled the craft up and swung around in a wide arc to give the four-man crew a wider perspective. Then he sighted a better place to reach the girl.

“What do you think, guys?” Shakstad asked. The men quickly agreed that it would be a tight fit between two rows of power lines, but it was feasible.

With Capt. Timothy Quinn, 61, suspended beneath the aircraft by a harness and steel cable, Shakstad slowly descended, the chopper’s prop blast ruffling the coursing water.

“She was going pretty quick,” said Quinn, a 22-year Fire Department veteran who had never before carried out a real swift-water rescue. “I was totally focused--I was trained to do this.”

As he approached Megan, arms outstretched, Quinn dropped into the water, breasting the waves, then grabbed the girl and the pair were hoisted to safety. The entire operation took about 12 minutes, fire officials said.

The girls, both suffering from hypothermia and scrapes and bruises, were taken to local hospitals and released later Tuesday night.

During Wednesday’s news conference the girls hugged their smiling rescuers tightly and thanked them.

“It’s just, like, amazing. This is, like, the person who saved my life,” Megan said of Quinn.

“It’s like wonderful.”

“We don’t want anybody to go into the water, but if they do, we want it to end up like this,” said Dan Arnold, coordinator of the Fire Department’s swift water rescue team. “It went so perfectly, we can’t ask for anything better than that.”

A Fire Department spokesman, Capt. Steve J. Ruda, called the girls’ actions an example of what not to do during an intense storm. Another press conference with Fire Chief William R. Bamattre is being planned for today, Ruda said, with the girls to be there to serve as a cautionary example.

The girls also plan to be active in their school safety programs as well: “We’re going to write out a little thing that we’re going to give to all the students, like, that says, this could happen to you,” Jennifer said.

Meanwhile, San Fernando Valley homeowners and utility crews, like weary hosts after a raucous party, spent Wednesday mopping up the mess left behind by the season’s fiercest storm to date. Under sunny skies with scattered clouds, Caltrans workers removed debris along Valley freeways and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power crews restored power to the last of some 10,000 customers who had experienced outages during the storm.

Streets in the Sepulveda Basin reopened at 1:30 p.m. and California Highway Patrol officials reported clear freeways after a day of snarled traffic.

In Calabasas, Mary Pat Carlisi looked at her wrinkled wallpaper and stepped on the soggy carpet in her two-story home on Park Serena and sighed deeply.

“The drain was stopped up around the skylight and the water just came down the walls and onto the carpet,” Carlisi lamented. “I was up all night putting down towels, drying them and putting down fresh ones--and buckets too.”

Carlisi’s neighbor on Park Sienna, who asked not to be identified, watched as a plumber used a power snake to clear tree roots from an underground storm drain at the front of her two-story stucco home.

The woman said water backed up in the drain, seeped under the front door and flooded a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. “I’ve lived here for 15 years,” she said. “This has never happened before.”

But it may happen again.

According to meteorologists for WeatherData Inc., a forecasting company that provides information to The Times, three more storm systems will sweep in from the Pacific Ocean by the end of the week.

Meteorologist Wes Etheredge said the first, and weakest, of the storms will arrive today, followed by a stronger storm system on Friday which may dump as much as three inches of rain.

A third storm should arrive Saturday night or Sunday morning, Etheredge said.