3rd Storm Lashes County, Southland as Damage Mounts

Torrential rains from the third major storm in five days pummeled Ventura County Friday morning, hitting hardest in Camarillo, where officials said flooding of City Hall and dozens of homes caused up to $1 million in damage.

The rest of the waterlogged county fared better, but still staggered under the force of a series of strong storms expected to continue through next week.

The early morning downpour Friday snarled Ventura County rush-hour traffic with dozens of accidents and flooded intersections, swamped school classrooms in Ventura and Somis, and swept into shops in downtown Santa Paula.

The toll to county farm crops mounted to perhaps double the $5.5-million estimate earlier this week, officials said.

Eastern Ventura County, generally spared earlier this week, reeled Friday with 2 1/2 inches of rain flooding streets in Newbury Park, ripping a 20-foot sinkhole in Moorpark Road near Thousand Oaks High School and short-circuiting two major repair jobs--on a cracked Thousand Oaks sewer line and a key bridge on California 118 near Moorpark.

Across California, the scene was much the same. A furious blast of morning rain destroyed a 120-unit Los Angeles apartment, power flickered--then fizzled--in thousands of homes, and five accidents involving more than 50 cars halted traffic on the Ventura Freeway in the San Fernando Valley.

Gov. Pete Wilson, citing “conditions of extreme peril,” declared a state of emergency in 12 more counties, including Santa Barbara. Twenty-two counties are now officially disaster areas because of this week’s storms, which have caused four deaths and destroyed 1,111 residences and 150 other buildings, state officials said.

No lives were lost Friday, but there were several close calls.

Rescue crews sped into action in Ventura County when a Ford Taurus slid off the freeway, careened down a rain-slicked slope and tipped over the edge of the Arroyo Simi flood control channel, anchored only by the back wheels, which snagged on the channel’s edge. Highway patrol officers and sheriff’s deputies pulled both the car and the unidentified driver to safety.

Elsewhere in Ventura County, rescue workers took to rubber rafts in a door-to-door search in Camarillo to make sure no one was trapped inside deluged homes under 4 feet of water.

The City Council declared Camarillo a disaster area late in the day.

“I have never seen it rain as hard and as fast in so short a time as it did between 8:35 and 9:45 this morning,” said City Manager Bill Little. “It just poured. We were in a meeting at City Hall and they came and told us there was water coming through the front door. We called for sandbags, but they didn’t get here in time.”

Most of the Civic Center was filled with flood water up to 3 inches deep, and 30 cars in the parking lot were flooded, Little said.

Residential flooding spread for miles along the Ponderosa Drive flood channel, tearing a 200-foot chunk out of the channel and causing heavy flood damage to dozens of dwellings, Little said.

“In public and private damage, it’s going to be in the millions,” Little said. Later, at a news conference, city officials lowered that estimate to between $500,000 and $1 million, but said the figure is sure to rise.

A half-mile west of City Hall, for example, residents of a 30-unit condo complex were startled by the crash of waves that tumbled from the Ponderosa channel about 9 a.m.

“It just happened real fast,” said Tom Farrell, 38. “I looked out my window and saw a wall of water coming down my back driveway.”

All of the garages in his 30-unit complex were flooded 2- to 3-feet deep. “At least we don’t have to clean out the garage,” said Farrell’s wife, Cindy. “Now we just throw everything away.”

Camarillo suffered extensive flooding in several other locations also. Water up to 4-feet deep filled streets near Pleasant Valley Hospital when hillside drainage channels overflowed, and an elderly couple was rescued by boat when their trailer park filled with 3 feet of water. The Ventura Freeway also closed in Camarillo, and surface traffic came to a near standstill for two hours.

The Camarillo sewer plant was also imperiled, when the Conejo Creek jumped its banks near Camarillo Springs. Flood waters surrounded the facility and rose to within 6 inches of the top of a protective berm.

Most west county communities hammered on Monday and Tuesday came out of Friday’s downpour relatively unscathed: The Ojai Valley experienced almost no flooding, and seven Ventura Avenue apartments threatened by a slipping hillside survived the day.

But in Port Hueneme, a 14-unit low-income apartment complex flooded again, sending about 30 residents to a reopened Red Cross shelter at Hueneme High School.

County farmers took another hit, when the Conejo Creek overflowed near Camarillo and rainwater filled furrows across the Oxnard Plain. Previously this week, the county’s agricultural industry lost $5.5 million when hundreds of acres of row crops were submerged.

“There’s no question there’s been additional damage,” said Rex Laird, county Farm Bureau executive director. “Overall, it’s probably going to double the original damage estimate. It’s the classic situation for every major storm--the citrus and avocados do fine, and the strawberries and vegetables and people on the flatlands get hammered.”

About 4,300 homes and businesses also lost power Friday morning in Ojai, Santa Paula, Thousand Oaks and Oxnard, with the Ojai outage affecting 3,600.

In Thousand Oaks, crews working around the clock repaired a sewer main about 5 a.m., after it had leaked about 18 million gallons of raw sewage into the Conejo Creek since Tuesday, polluting 15 miles of creek and closing beaches in two counties. But by 6:30 a.m., the rains had washed out the 30-inch concrete pipe again.

“Everything we have done was for naught,” Public Works Director Don Nelson told a special meeting of the City Council.

And along California 118 between Somis and Moorpark, Caltrans crews repairing a key bridge also suffered a setback when racing currents of Long Canyon Creek swept away much of the crews’ earlier work.

The 1907 bridge was being shored up on one side by dirt and stones from a Corona quarry.

“I was hoping to have it open sometime this weekend, but I doubt that now very seriously,” said Jim Hansen, a Caltrans supervisor.

About a 5-mile section of the highway along Somis and parts of Moorpark has been closed since Tuesday.

In Moorpark, the morning storm also drew a small audience in the city’s old downtown on High Street. A 68-foot limb from one of the stately pepper trees snapped off, smashing two cars traveling in opposite directions. No one was hurt.

By afternoon, as showers abated, rainfall totals for the week rose to 10 inches in coastal areas and 15 in the Ojai mountains--about three-fourths of normal for the entire winter in some locations.

“The intensity of this system caught everyone by surprise,” said meteorologist Gary Ryan of the National Weather Service in Oxnard. “We just couldn’t keep the radar going fast enough to track all of the precipitation, thunderstorms and squall lines that came into Ventura County today. And it looks like a very wet-weather regime in California as far out as we can see.”

The weekend looks even worse in Northern California, which came through Friday’s wet weather in good shape, but which is due for a pounding when the next storm system hits land.

This was “a typical winter storm, the kind that we have almost every year,” said meteorologist John Sherwin of WeatherData Inc. “And there are two more on the way.”

Before they could even focus on the next round of storms, however, Southland residents had to clean up the mess left by Friday’s deluge.

And was it ever a mess.

Health officials shut down beaches in Pacific Palisades and Marina del Rey as sewage poured out of manholes unable to handle the torrents of rain.

Beaches along the length of Ventura County have been closed since Wednesday because of health hazards posed by the Thousand Oaks sewage spill and as a precaution against toxic urban runoff.

A giant sinkhole, the size of a football field, developed along Pacific Palisades Drive; authorities said the road asphalt crumbled because the overtaxed storm-drain system simply couldn’t handle so much rain in such a short time, and water backed up in the street. The rush of water was so strong, in fact, that it swept more than a dozen parked cars a half-mile down the street.

“It just became a river all of a sudden,” said Jeff Torgan, who works in Highlands Market down the street.

In all, Caltrans estimated that the storms have cost more than $2.3 million for road repairs this week in Ventura and Los Angeles counties alone.

And that figure does not include the other frantic fix-it jobs going on around the state.

Mud and muck were everywhere in Southern California.

A shopping mall in Goleta, in Santa Barbara County, was inundated when a nearby creek overflowed. More than 50 farm workers had to be evacuated from their homes in the same town when a nearby lake topped its dam.

Two cars were all but buried in mud in Newport Beach, across the street from the Balboa Yacht Club.

Rainfall totals for the 24-hour period ending at 4 p.m. Friday included 2.27 inches at Westwood, 2.2 at Pasadena, 2.01 at Chatsworth, 1.96 at Van Nuys, 1.73 at Montebello, 1.71 at the Los Angeles Civic Center and 1.14 in Redondo Beach.

The storm cut electric power to more than 108,000 customers from Stockton to Laguna Beach, keeping repair crews from three power companies busy.

The outages lasted anywhere from 30 seconds to several hours--with thousands still without electricity late Friday, said officials from PG&E;, Southern California Edison and DWP.

Around the state, vegetable and strawberry crops suffered damage of about $15 million, according to the California Farm Bureau.

While those figures sound alarming--and represent serious loss to some growers--they are small change compared with the toll from last year’s flooding, which was estimated at $297 million statewide.

This go-round, strawberries on the Oxnard Plain suffered the most damage, as the rain pelted them over the past few days. Even then, though, the crops were not a total loss: Growers continued to harvest bruised berries to sell at reduced prices to processors for use in jams and juices.

“Farmers are doing the best they can to get through this with the prospect of more storms ahead,” state Farm Bureau spokesman Bob Krauter said. “Farmers are always faced with risks from Mother Nature, year in and year out.”

While Southern California slogged grimly through the mud Friday, folks farther north were enjoying a brief respite. Their storm system proved much weaker than predicted, giving swollen rivers a chance to settle down.

“It’s not really brighter in the sense of sunshine coming out, but it is a better forecast for the rivers of Northern California,” said Jeff Cohen, a spokesman for the state’s Flood Center.

Still, a few trouble spots--and the forecast of heavy rains ahead--conspired to keep emergency workers on edge.

“As far as I can tell,” said Jaime Arteaga, a spokesman for the Office of Emergency Services, “no one’s getting a day off.”

Indeed, some 1,600 people remained in shelters in Northern California on Friday night, most of them in Watsonville, where the Pajaro River spilled its banks and threatened to lap toward homes. As of late Friday, about 3,500 people had been evacuated from their homes.

More evacuations seemed likely.

In Daly City, for example, just south of San Francisco, seven cliff-top homes clung precariously to the rain-soaked landfill they were built on in the 1960s.

Earlier this week, wind and rain ate away 30 feet of the cliff, threatening the homes above Avalon Canyon.

“The condition of the canyon is extremely unstable and extremely unsafe,” Assistant City Manager Pat Martel said. “If these rains continue, it is anyone’s guess what is going to happen.”

A similar problem was developing in Oakland, where public works officials kept a wary eye on saturated hillsides. One house had to be demolished as it started to slide into a neighbor lower on a slope.

In San Francisco, rain washed over the Embarcadero, nearly a dozen trees toppled in Golden Gate park and 50 flights were canceled at San Francisco Airport. Half the planes that did take off left late, said spokesman Ron Wilson. Delays ranged from 15 minutes to two hours, with similar delays expected over the weekend.

Further south in Big Sur, the Air Force National Guard continued to ferry in medicine and pluck out stranded tourists and residents for a third day Friday. Caltrans officials said it would be days, if not weeks, before washed-out roads into the area would be repaired.

Predicting the worst elsewhere, the Army Corps of Engineers sent crews to shore up eroding riverbanks or leaking levees at three spots in the Sacramento area.

“Lucky for us the winds died down, or we would have topped some levees,” said Carl Dombek, an emergency worker in San Joaquin County.

*

Times staff writer Stephanie Simon and correspondents Troy Heie, Richard Warchol, Dawn Hobbs and Regina Hong contributed to this story.

* IN VENTURA COUNTY

The nasty weather hit some places harder than others. B2

* Related stories, photos: B1-4