O.C. Residents Are Full of Sog Stories

Motorists like Mark Kyle and his buddies gambled with nature and lost on Friday.

Kyle, 21, and friends Drew Biggs, 21, and Joel Churchill, 24, were sure Kyle’s sports car would make it through a waterlogged crossing near Newport Boulevard and West Coast Highway.

They were wrong.

“We ended up in waist-high water,” Kyle said. “So, we rolled the windows down and just jumped out. Then we had to push the car into a parking lot and try to find someone to give us a jump.”

There were stories like that throughout Orange County, which had just mopped up from the last storm when torrential rains and powerful winds came again.

In Newport Beach, a mudslide pushed cars around like toys.

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“The slide crushed two cars that were parked on the street,” said Sharry Shaver, a secretary at the Balboa Yacht Club on Bayside Drive. “And I saw some huge rocks coming down the hill. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

No injuries were reported, authorities said.

The worst slides were above Bayside Drive, where a slope in the 1800 block gave way while a larger slide above the same street dumped even more mud, blocking the thoroughfare to traffic. “The cars were just inundated,” said John Blauer of the Newport Beach Fire and Marine Department.

In Turtle Rock in Irvine, horrified residents watched a swirling torrent of water gush from Bonita Canyon and rush toward their homes as the storm overwhelmed the neighborhood’s drainage system.

Sandra Block was trapped inside her townhouse.

“In the backyard, it was like a river,” the 50-year-old teacher said. “And I couldn’t go out the front door, it was like Niagara Falls. I had 4 feet of mud and water in [one part] of my house . . . I mean, when the Fire Department has to come in and hose down your walls, that’s bad.”

Block said she and her neighbors endured a similar flood in December and complained to city officials about drainage problems. On Friday, as the water rose, she again called the city for help.

“I was terrified, I was stranded,” she said. “It’s very frightening to have the water coming at you and no way out and no one is coming to help.” Eventually, firefighters arrived and helped her.

Real estate broker Mike Martin, 45, lives down the street, and he raced to shove towels beneath his doors when he saw “this torrent of water” heading his way.

“But it came over the sandbags, through the door, through the towels,” he said, adding that he plans to move soon to someplace “high on the hill” in San Juan Capistrano.

For the most part, it was tough going for motorists blinded by heavy sheets of rain.

Walter Crespi, 20, of Fullerton, scanned the water flowing across MacArthur Boulevard near Ford Road in Newport Beach and thought it wasn’t deep. He gunned his van’s motor and went for it, only to have his engine conk out, joining a Mercedes and a Jeep stalled in the intersection.

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“I hit it too fast and I ended up stuck in the middle of the road. The water killed my engine,” said Crespi, who would have remained there for hours if Scott McClung hadn’t come along in his ’85 GMC four-wheel drive Suburban.

McClung, a 35-year-old sea captain in Newport Beach, spent the day in the role of good Samaritan. He hooked onto Crespi’s van and with his truck winch, towed him out of the intersection.

“I had just been over on Jamboree and I pulled three cars out of that intersection,” McClung said. “It’s no big deal. I don’t charge anyone and all I get is just thanks from the owners.”

Kristin Morris, the owner and manager of Newport Cleaners, got some experience cleaning something other than garments.

“Well, here I am mopping up the floor,” she said. “The water just came up really quick and started coming in the front door. I’m trying to clean up now.”

In eastern Orange County, canyon roads tucked in the rugged Santa Ana Mountains were under several inches of water in dozens of spots.

“I was coming down Santiago Canyon Road hydroplaning,” said Leslie Paskus of Silverado. “I have a small sports car, a Fiero, very low to the ground. . . . I did not believe I was going to make it out of the canyon.”

And amid the chaos in Irvine, customers at Il Fornaio restaurant dropped what they were eating and ran for cover when a canvas roof overflowed, sending a waterfall cascading into the center of the restaurant.

“We had to ask everybody to leave that area,” said manager David Carteni. “We aren’t set up for that kind of a storm and the canvas couldn’t support that much water.”

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Times staff writer Janet Wilson and correspondent Lisa Addison contributed to this report.