Families Avoid Dam Disaster

Residents who spent the night in the shadow of a potentially catastrophic disaster expressed relief Tuesday as city crews succeeded in keeping a seven-acre lake of water from washing through midtown neighborhoods.

More than 60 families in neighborhoods around Poli Street had been warned by the city that a landslide about three miles north of town in Hall Canyon had dammed a natural spillway, trapping millions of gallons of water, mud and debris there.

With Monday’s rains, city officials feared that the earthen dam might give way and inundate the area with as much as 3 feet of water and slicks of silty mud.

Crews from the city Department of Public Works and Texaco, which leases part of the canyon and runs pipelines through the area, worked throughout the night draining the water, which officials estimate was at least 30 feet deep and at one point threatened to crest the dam and wash it downstream.

“Anything that I could say right now would not do the work they did justice,” Ventura Mayor Jim Friedman said. “Without question, they’ve diverted a disaster.”

Yet with every new cloud, the threat of the Hall Canyon dam collapsing remains, officials say.

The latest downpour did not leave Ventura completely unscathed: Mud flows from exposed hillsides covered downtown streets, as well as neighborhoods along Ventura Avenue.

But the fast-moving storm, which dropped 1 to 2 inches of rain across Ventura County, did nothing to disrupt three days of cleanup efforts on a Ventura oil spill or damage recent repairs to a sewer line in Thousand Oaks.

On Tuesday, five teams of emergency assistance workers arrived to help public agencies recoup about $36 million in damage and other costs associated with the disaster.

Teams of state and federal officials will advise cities and the county government how to seek reimbursement for costs such as overtime, use of emergency equipment, and damage to public buildings, roads and flood control channels.

The heroic efforts to maintain the earthen dam at Hall Canyon will tap deep into the city’s overtime reserves.

On Monday, workers installed four massive diesel-powered pumps that drain about 15,000 gallons of water a minute. That brought the water level down about 11 inches before the storm dumped additional rain.

Within hours, the lake of brown water rose another 6 to 7 feet and threatened to crest the loose earthen dam, which most likely would have washed away in a roiling torrent of mud, rocks, debris and water.

Using heavy machinery and all the elbow grease they could muster, workers built up the dam about 5 feet and installed a 4-foot drainage pipe to divert water into the storm channel.

However, about 3:30 a.m., the water filled the pipe to capacity and continued to rise until weather-weary workers carved a notch into the dam to relieve the pressure and keep it from collapsing altogether.

“We got through this pretty much unscathed,” Ventura Police Lt. Carl Handy said. “But it was close, really close.”

With a two-day window before the next storm rolls in off the Pacific, crews will continue working to drain the water.

According to meteorologists at the National Weather Service, three more storms--all with the potential of heavy rains--are lined up across the Pacific.

Forecasters predict that the next storm will hit the California coast Thursday, with the others coming ashore next week.

Deputies from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department discovered the lake of water Thursday and believe that it was caused after a mudslide pinched off the canyon more than a week ago.

The water, they said, collected in the canyon after last week’s series of drenching storms, which caused major flooding in Camarillo and Ventura.

The threat of a major flood washing over neighborhoods in Ventura had scores of residents understandably concerned.

Some spent Monday ringing their homes with sandbags, while others took a wait-and-see approach.

“I listened to the radio all day yesterday to see what was happening and what was going to happen,” said 69-year-old JoAnn Montgomery, whose Hall Canyon Road home hugs the concrete storm channel that flows out of the canyon. “Thank God nothing happened though; I was concerned.”

Virginia Drive resident Joanna Dudley Overby, 68, stored her valuables and prepared to evacuate her home in case the dam broke.

“I’m all packed,” she said while threading her way through rooms heaped with books and possessions. “I got everything of value and put it out of the reach of the water.”

In the living room, she stacked cat books on a card table. Sheets of piano music were piled on the piano bench and, in the next room, in a square wooden box, her mother’s jewelry was placed atop the bed.

She said friends called to see if she wanted to stay with them, but she opted to stay and hunkered down with her cat, Desdemona, and waited for the latest reports.

“The first thing I’m going to do is get Desdemona a cage,” she said of her plans for preparing for the rains predicted later this week.

Others, however, had a hard time finding a smile amid all the water and mud that had carpeted streets in downtown Ventura.

Carla Bonney, owner of the Titus Paul Gallery at Kalorama and Main streets, arrived at work early Tuesday to find a 3-inch layer of brown sludge covering the floors of her photo and art framing shop.

With a 2-foot stack of artwork ruined, Bonney faulted the city for failing to warn her of the danger of flowing mud. “It’s going to cost me all the money I’m going to make this week,” she said. “I have eight kids. I can’t afford to have something like this occur.”

Neighborhoods on the north end of Ventura Avenue also woke to streets covered with mud. In the cleanup effort there, one county worker accidentally picked up a rattlesnake with a pile of debris and found it later in the bed of his truck.

Sheriff’s deputies warned residents to look out for snakes, as well as broken glass or metal, when cleaning up after the rains.

The latest storm also worried crews working to mop up a weekend oil spill. They feared that any substantial rain might wash some of the estimated 8,400 gallons of crude oil that spilled into the San Jon Barranca on Saturday into the ocean.

A crew of more than 50 workers spent Monday at the beach building a dam designed to trap any oil while allowing water to empty into the ocean.

Officials said none of the sticky crude made it that far, but the rain did keep inspection crews from examining the hills where a landslide ruptured a Shell Oil Co. line Saturday.

Instead, crews hired by Shell--armed with squeegees, brooms and shovels--pitched in to help an already overworked city staff by clearing a foot of mud that had collected at Sanjon Road and Harbor Boulevard.

With the threat of oil seeping into the ocean and threatening marine wildlife abated, crews spent the remainder of Tuesday dismantling the dam.

They will continue to monitor the landslide area for further problems.

“Even though we haven’t seen anything that might be a problem, the hills are still so wet that the danger isn’t over,” said Ventura County Fire Department spokesman Joe Luna, who has responded to three pipeline ruptures in the last four days. “And with the rain that’s on the way, it could happen again.”

On Tuesday, a two-person outreach team from the Federal Emergency Management Agency began knocking on doors and walking streets in the county’s hardest-hit areas.

Although individual and commercial claims for federal aid are being handled through a special hotline, the outreach workers came to be sure that local residents are aware what help is available.

FEMA information officer Jesse Seigal said 359 people and an unknown number of businesses in the county had registered for federal disaster aid for a variety of weather-related problems: mudslides, flooding, surf damage and homes sliding down mud-soaked hillsides.

Since Ventura County is a federal disaster area, storm victims may apply for grants to cover temporary housing and minor home repairs, unemployment benefits for lost jobs, grants of up to $13,400 for other needs, and low-interest loans to homeowners and shopkeepers for major building repairs.

“This is just the beginning of the process that nobody sees, and that’s the recovery,” said Laura Hernandez, assistant chief in the county Office of Emergency Services.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

County Rainfall

Here are rainfall figures from the Ventura County Flood Control Department for the 24-hour period ending at 8 a.m. Tuesday. Oct. 1 is the beginning of the official rain year.

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Rainfall Rainfall Normal rainfall Location last 24 hours since Oct. 1 to date Camarillo 0.83 23.71 8.68 Casitas Dam 1.89 36.49 15.27 Casitas Rec. 2.01 35.97 15.32 Center Fillmore NA NA NA Matilija Dam 1.61 36.74 17.41 Moorpark 0.63 23.26 9.44 Ojai 1.50 28.34 13.75 Upper Ojai 0.67 31.08 14.87 Oxnard 0.55 26.23 9.41 Piru 0.83 22.89 11.05 Port Hueneme 0.59 25.55 9.23 Santa Paula 1.42 26.31 11.53 Simi Valley 0.51 23.92 9.11 Thousand Oaks 0.67 22.81 9.84 Ventura Govt. 1.73 30.57 10.41 Center

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Times staff writer Hilary E. MacGregor and correspondent Richard Warchol contributed to this story.