New Storm Unleashing New Woes for Soggy County

Just as residents were mopping up after the powerful storm that pounded Ventura County earlier this week, another wicked weather system swept across the county Friday, unleashing new problems for a region already reeling from El Nino’s winter onslaught.

Every inch of the county was soaked by Friday’s downpour. But the nasty weather hit some places harder than others.

Take the Port Hueneme apartment house where Yolanda Anguiano lives.

For the second time this week, she and about 40 neighbors were chased from the complex after flood waters gushed into a parking lot and seeped into their apartment units.

The displaced residents were just back from emergency shelters and counting their losses when they were forced to clear out again.

Anguiano, who recently moved back to her hometown of Port Hueneme after living in the Bay Area the past few years, said she was beginning to regret the return.

“I came back because I missed walking on the pier,” she said, referring to the storm-battered landmark splintered by strong waves earlier this week. “Now, I don’t want to live near the beach.”

Piggyback Rescues

It took a lot to convince Virginia Forbes and Russ Murawski, both 75 years old and blind, to leave their east Ventura mobile home.

Even as flood waters from a nearby flower field inundated the Country Estates mobile home park near California 126 and Wells Road, the couple refused to be coaxed from the trailer.

A storm drain had become choked with mud and other debris about 9 a.m., causing water to rise knee-high and threaten to undermine the home. Emergency crews cleared the drain, but it became clogged again.

“We told them they should get out, and so did some firefighters who came by, but they wouldn’t budge,” neighbor Dom Mercurio said. “They even wouldn’t move for the firefighters.”

Finally, when the water rose to dangerous levels, Mercurio’s grandson, Peter, 22, and a 19-year-old friend, Seth Gray, went into the home and carried the elderly couple to safety.

As Murawski was being carried piggyback across the flooded street, the feisty senior said, “You know, Virginia, this is about the stupidest thing we could have done. How the hell are we going to get back in there?”

Forbes said she had not been scared when she heard neighbors screaming for her and Murawski to leave.

“I’ve had a lot of disasters in my life, so this is just another day,” she said as rescuers handed her cups of coffee inside the park’s recreation room. “Everything is going to be all right.”

Downtown Deluge

A backed-up storm drain pushed water a foot high into half a dozen businesses in the 900 block of Main Street in downtown Santa Paula.

The clog was yet another setback for Main Street merchants, who already are wading through a delayed downtown reconstruction project that has kept streets dug up and shoppers shopping elsewhere.

“They say it’s part of the reconstruction and we have to endure,” said Gustavo Ramirez, owner of a Main Street income tax service where water found its way in through the front and back doors. “There’s not much we can say. We’ve complained so many times. All we can do is wait.”

Jesse Villa, 29, owner of the One-Stop Electronics repair shop, said that when rain began pouring down at 9 a.m., he started grabbing sandbags left on the street by the city Fire Department and stuffing them into shop doorways.

Ten minutes later, he was glad he did.

“If I wasn’t here, maybe the whole store would have been flooded, the way it was going.”

He only had to look a couple doors down at the Godinez Barber Shop, where employees were mopping water out both the front and back doors.

“You know how it is in Southern California,” said Joel Liechty of Terra Cal Construction, the firm doing the downtown reconstruction work. “When it rains, it pours.”

The Early Bell

When the chocolate-colored water crested the barranca behind Friends Elementary School in Ventura, teachers and administrators wasted no time herding the youngsters to safety.

About 75 students at the private elementary school marched over to a Market Street VFW post, sloshing through knee-deep water during the height of the storm.

The churning torrent flushed through the barranca with such force that it mangled a chain-link fence meant to keep people out of the culvert.

“It looked like a raging river,” said second-grade teacher Marianne Carwin. “It was like watching white-water rapids, except the water wasn’t white.”

At the VFW hall, the youngsters slipped out of their wet socks and shoes before proceeding to infect the place with a high dose of rainy-day energy. A steady stream of parents arrived throughout the morning, plucking their children from the preteen torrent.

“We were a little concerned because of that barranca,” said Mickie Nichols, who arrived to pick up her 6-year-old daughter, Teddi. “But I knew the kids were in good hands.”

Water Rescues

In Thousand Oaks, rescue teams from the Ventura County fire and sheriff’s departments suspended their search until today for a woman who may have been swept down a swollen drainage ditch that skirts the Ventura Freeway.

Authorities said they received three reports from people who heard a woman’s voice crying for help near the end of Boardwalk Avenue about 2 p.m.

When authorities arrived, they found footprints in the sand leading up to the edge of a collapsed bank. They found no footsteps leading away.

“It’s one of those calls that seems validated by the evidence,” said Fire Department spokeswoman Sandi Wells. “We’re taking this very seriously.”

Rescue personnel first searched the stretch of ditch near The Oaks mall that leads from an underground channel and flows to the Conejo Creek and later into Hill Canyon.

Fighting their way through soggy thickets and bamboo bushes bent at right angles from the high-level current, rescue workers found nothing except an old pair of pants caught on a branch.

“We anticipated that any victim would have been washed out the other side of the [underground] channel, but we didn’t find anything,” said Chad Cook of the Ventura County Fire Department.

Earlier in the day, two men were arrested and then released after sheriff’s deputies found them dragging their two-person raft out of a storm channel near Keats] Avenue, said sheriff’s Senior Deputy Ed Tumbleson.

Brian Thorkildsen and Mike Fernandez, both 22, told deputies that they had jumped a fence near Acorn Akers at a point where the Sidlee Street wash was calm, Tumbleson said.

The men dropped their yellow inflatable rubber raft into the water and went for a joy ride, but they hit a strong current within minutes. They were able to beach their raft just before the arrival of emergency crews--who were responding to several calls of seeing the men in the wash.

Thorkildsen and Fernandez were not injured in the 2:15 p.m. incident. They are scheduled to appear in Simi Valley Municipal Court later this month on misdemeanor charges of illegally entering a posted area, Tumbleson said.

Dodging a Bullet

Heavy rains continued to cause moderate street flooding and minor landslides in the Ojai Valley, but residents said the storm failed to pack the punch delivered by a more severe deluge earlier this week.

“This is only half of what we had,” said Randi McAfee, who almost lost her home to surging flood waters Tuesday when the collapse of a 7-foot retaining wall sent a river of muddy water through her Avenida de la Vereda neighborhood.

“We were spared,” she said, watching her neighbors dig out from the muddy mess.

With the water already carving a clear course through her neighborhood of small tract homes, McAfee said she is not particularly worried about more flooding this season.

“It’s already made its path,” she said, standing in a shallow pool of muddy water moving down her street. “And we’re just here to watch it.”

A few miles away, residents on McNell and Thacher roads continued to pile sandbags in front of their driveways to divert water overflowing from backed-up storm drains.

“The volume of water is just too much,” said homeowner Dean Miner as he hauled burlap sacks filled with sand from a pickup truck.

Storm Veterans

Jonathan Harrel was having breakfast with his wife in their La Conchita home when he heard a roar.

It was the sound of mud and bowling-ball sized boulders rolling down his street. He and his wife peeked out the window and watched a wall of mud, water and debris pour down Fillmore Avenue and across Surfside Street.

“It was just a torrent, a torrent coming down,” said Harrel, a 72-year-old retired minister who has lived in the seaside community for 26 years.

Harrel, who went through the devastating 1995 slides in La Conchita, was relieved as the rain subsided, but said the ground was so saturated that another downpour could bring down more mud.

“It’s ready to go,” he said, looking across the rock-strewn road and up to the crumbling hillside that looms over the community.

One block over on San Fernando Street, Donna Baker and ex-husband Thad Baker had just returned from a shopping trip, where they had loaded up with provisions.

A resident of La Conchita for only the last two years, Donna Baker said she was surprised that the hillside could move so quickly.

“I thought they were exaggerating when they told us about what happened last time,” she said. “I guess they weren’t.”

*

Staff writers Scott Hadly, Chris Chi and Tracy Wilson and correspondents Coll Metcalfe, Richard Warchol, Nick Green, Troy Heie and Robert Gammon contributed to this report.

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Rain in Your Neighborhood

This map shows the amounts of rain that fell on different parts of Ventura County on Friday from midnight to 4 p.m. The data were gathered by a rotating Doppler radar unit on Sulphur Mountain (at the center of the radar signals’ vortex in the northwest section of the map.) It can measure percipitation amounts within square-mile areas.

Source: WeatherData Inc.

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Ventura County Storm Damage

1. Upper Matillja Canyon: County’s heaviest rainfalls, more than 3 inches.

2. La Conchita: Downpour about 9 a.m. sends foot-deep flow of water, mud and boulders down Fillmore Avenue to Union Pacific Railroad tracks, which are closed.

3. Ventura Harbor: Water spout descends on mobile home park, ripping awnings off at least two homes.

4. Ventura: One classroom at Friend’s School is flooded when water overflows a barranca, forcing evacuation of 60 students to VFW hall.

5. Saticoy: Elderly couple are carried piggyback from their mobile home as a wall protecting mobile home park breaks, flooding streets.

6. Santa Paula: Heavy rains cause minor flooding of six downtown businesses and close Mupu School.

7. Oxnard and Port Hueneme: Widespread street flooding, closing major roads.

8. Port Hueneme: A 14-unit apartment complex is flooded for the second time in three days, displacing about 30 residents. Red Cross reopens shelter at Hueneme High School.

9. Point Mugu: Navy personnel deployed to sandbagging duty after naval station begins to flood. Pacific Coast Highway closed as Calleguas Creek overflows onto street.

10. Camarillo: City gets 2 inches of rain in an hour, causing major damage at City Hall and in neighborhoods along Ponderosa Drive, where hundreds of homes are flooded. A rescue team saves elderly couple in mobile home park.

11. East Camarillo: Ventura Freeway temporarily closed in midmorning as rains make driving hazardous. Las Posas and Lewis roads temporarily closed from heavy flooding; Conejo Creek overflows.

12. Northeast Camarillo: Flood control channels overflow.

13. Somis: Two classrooms at Somis School are flooded, forcing 50 students to move.

14. California 118: Repair work on bridge on highway is undermined by new storm.

15. Moorpark: Tree falls on two cars, prompting emergency rescue.

16. Newbury Park: Heavy street flooding, several stalled cars in several feet of water.

17. Thousand Oaks: Sewer main broken Tuesday morning was fully repaired by 5 a.m., but storm broke it again. At least 20 million gallons of raw sewage have gushed into Conejo Creek.

18. Thousand Oaks: Twenty-foot deep sinkhole on Moorpark Road halts traffic near Thousand Oaks High School.

19. Thousand Oaks: Rescuers search Arroyo Conejo near Moorpark Road after at least one person was sighted in the water.