Deluge Strands Scores at Home or on Roads

Jim Farned tried to persuade himself that the flooding was a catastrophe. Still, as owner of the Summerland Inn in Summerland, Farned could not help but manage an upbeat note when he thought of all the hapless commuters who might need a dry place to hole up for the night.

“More stranded motorists,” he said. “Hooray!”

Indeed, as a third storm in a week walloped Southern California on Tuesday, scores of people found themselves stranded: in stalled cars, in mud-swamped homes and, perhaps most dramatically, in the swollen, raging Ventura River.

But for every dramatic rescue scene, scores of private dramas played themselves out.

From San Diego to Santa Barbara, individual homes, segments of streets and whole communities became islands unto themselves. Despite the emergency planning, despite zoning ordinances and sophisticated road design and billion-dollar drainage networks, residents dealt once again with the inescapable fact of life in the Southland: Mother Nature rules, and when she lets loose a bang there’s precious little you can do.

And although the storm wreaked havoc and disaster on some, for many it was a welcome opportunity to retreat from the pressures of urban life.

“It’s nice to be cut off from the rest of the world,” psychotherapist Bruce Rays mused as he huddled under an umbrella next to the buckling Malibu Creek Bridge. Even though his office was unreachable, forcing him to cancel patient appointments and lose income, Rays said he found the disaster oddly satisfying.

“There’s camaraderie,” he said, “All these people standing in the rain.”

No one needed to help Marcia Larsen, tucked away in her snug office in the Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce.

After listening to the somber recitation of road closures on the radio, Larsen quickly assessed her position: She couldn’t drive south to Ventura. She couldn’t drive south to Carpinteria. And she couldn’t care less.

“We seem to be landlocked,” Larsen said with a chuckle. “But I love this city, so it’s not a problem.”

Dr. Devora Lockton, a psychologist who works in Los Angeles County, predicted that many residents might share Larsen’s devilish delight in being stranded. For those who did not suffer personal losses, she said, this disaster might actually be strangely peaceful, especially compared with recent earthquakes and fires.

“We’re all getting wet, but we’re not all being shaken,” Lockton said. “Many people will be happy to (hear) from an official source, ‘Don’t drive if you don’t have to.’ They can stay home, and it’s being officially sanctioned, so any guilt will go away.”

Such contentment, of course, may be possible only when a warm bed and clean socks are nearby. Those who found themselves stranded far from home--on flooded freeways or in water-logged buildings--were far less sanguine about the flooding.

“I want to go home!” Neil Patel, a 26-year-old graduate student, moaned as he stood in the middle of a shallow river once recognizable as Pacific Coast Highway. A boulder had skipped down a muddy cliff and smashed near his car as he had maneuvered to a Malibu-area McDonald’s for lunch. Unharmed but terrified, he had tried to return home--only to be met by a daunting roadblock. Amid total chaos on the closed highway, Patel clutched a soda and wondered aloud how he would navigate the raging waters to get home.

In a similar boat--or, similarly without a boat--were Mark Afrasiabi and Eric Astrada of Westwood. After visiting friends in Oxnard, the two had planned to return home Tuesday afternoon. But instead, they spent the gloomy pre-dusk hours stranded near Malibu Creek Bridge, seeking plastic garbage bags to serve as makeshift raincoats.

“We thought this would be a good way to go,” Afrasiabi, 19, said glumly. “I guess we screwed up. It looks like we’re trapped.”

That claustrophobic feeling also afflicted people who never ventured out of their houses or were lucky enough to make it home.

Hunkered down in his Malibu Canyon home, 18-year-old Erik Heng thought he had the perfect excuse to skip school. But realizing he could not cruise over to a friend’s house or swing by the video store, Heng began to find his confinement irritating by midday.

“You kind of have the feeling you’re trapped,” he said.

One woman sipping coffee inside a Malibu Starbucks was similarly disgruntled, grumbling to a friend, “You can’t rent a video or anything. You have to read or something.”

Distraught over a more serious loss, 84-year-old Esther Brown was near tears when sheriff’s deputies evacuated her from a mobile home park in Casitas Springs, in the Ojai Valley. She got out safely, and was staying in a warm shelter, but she had been forced to leave her cuddly cat, P.J., behind. “I hope he’s OK,” she said, looking shaken.

Red Cross shelters sprouted up all over Southern California to accommodate refugees like Brown. In the temporary havens, the flood victims huddled over hot sandwiches and steaming soups.

Others found themselves in more swank accommodations.

Sharon Huffman, 51, was traveling from her San Bernardino home of Highland to Ann Arbor, Mich., by train when the storm stopped her cold in Los Angeles. Amtrak had canceled all trains between Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo after 90 miles of tracks flooded early Tuesday morning. So Huffman was stuck.

“Right now, we’re terribly dependent on Mother Nature,” Amtrak spokeswoman Dawn Soper apologized.

Eager to make amends--and retain customers--Amtrak found Huffman accommodations and arranged for her to fly to Portland, Ore., where she could link up with a non-flooded train to Michigan. So instead of clacking along the coast in a sleeper car, Huffman spent Tuesday night in the Mayfair Hotel, happily reading “The Age of Innocence.”

“They were very, very nice, and my goodness, I feel very comfortable right now,” Huffman said. “I teach second grade, so I can pretty much accommodate myself to anything.”

Like hotels, a few other businesses profited by drawing customers in from the storm. Scores of hearty skiers who braved the pounding rain to look for snow in the San Bernardino Mountains ended up at the Family Bowling Center in Big Bear Lake, where business was described as “phenomenal.”

Janet Nicholas, 42, of Newport Beach said she came up Monday night with nine friends for a ski-racing trip at Bear Mountain Resort. Despite the miserable weather, Nicholas said she was happy to be there.

“I could be sitting in my office dealing with customers,” she said. “Instead, I’m dealing with drinking and bowling.”

Equally calm about his predicament, Gerry Haas, 48, stood and watched the stream straining its banks near his Ventura County home. Others fretted that the two-lane bridge linking their rural neighborhood to the urban world might collapse into the swollen Ventura River. But Haas remained unfazed.

“I prefer the river to people,” he said. “I’d rather deal with nature because we know what it’s going to do.”

Staff writer Miguel Bustillo contributed to this report.