Storm Rips at Southland’s Seams

An intense, El Nino-boosted storm raked California with torrential rains and wind-driven snow Monday, triggering mudslides and floods that blocked roads, cut rail lines and forced the temporary evacuation of 2,000 residents of Santa Paula.

Two women and a man washed into rain-swollen creeks escaped injury in Santa Clarita. Homes faced damage in Val Verde and Porter Ranch and the rain-loaded roof of an office building collapsed in Warner Center, doing an estimated $50,000 damage.

From Sun Valley to Topanga, Coldwater Canyon to Santa Clarita, mudslides and flood waters on mountain roads made driving a risky proposition. Electric power was cut to parts of the San Fernando Valley.

The Ventura River and several creeks overflowed their banks in widespread areas of Ventura County, prompting the evacuations in Santa Paula and the closure of the Ventura Freeway in both directions. Both California 150 and California 30 were flooded, leaving Ojai virtually isolated.

Mulholland Drive was closed by mudslides between Coldwater and Laurel canyon boulevards. The Pacific Coast Highway, Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Malibu Canyon Road were blocked by flooding and mudslides, largely cutting off Malibu to the east and north and forcing cancellation of classes at Pepperdine University.

Pierce College in Woodland Hills canceled evening classes Monday but planned to reopen at 7 a.m. today.

The full force of the storm quite literally hit home for Dave Frees, an 82-year-old Woodland Hills retiree whose morning routine was disrupted when an 80-foot-plus eucalyptus tree crashed into his second-story bedroom. He was not injured.

In the San Fernando Valley, an explosion, possibly caused by water getting into a circuit, damaged an electrical vault in the 18300 block of Collins Street in Tarzana about 11:20 a.m., said Department of Water and Power spokeswoman Treva Miller. As of 4:30 p.m., there were 335 customers in Woodland Hills and 400 in Northridge without power.

In the Santa Clarita Valley, mud and water seeped into a Metrolink train tunnel, prompting officials to cancel service Monday and today on the Lancaster line. Emergency crews were dispatched Monday to clear mud and silt from the 80-year-old tunnel, which has survived many storms and the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

Many of the train line’s 4,000 commuters boarded shuttle buses Monday that took them to other stops along the 77-mile route from Lancaster to downtown Los Angeles. Officials said no alternative bus service will be offered today.

Monday’s storm swept ashore from the Pacific before dawn, hammering coastal valleys with rains that flooded residential neighborhoods in Ventura and threatened houses on an unstable hillside in the Hollywood Hills.

A mudslide from Palisades Park gushed over the backyard and swimming pool of a home on North Calle Vista Court in Porter Ranch about 3:20 p.m.

“I was in the backyard loading sandbags, and then I saw some of the hill come down,” said a neighbor, Matthew Fein, 43. “I grabbed my daughter and we ran for the fence. I thought to myself, ‘This hill is alive.’ ”

“It seemed like a ton of mud flooding into our backyard,” said owner Helen Bergenfeld as she and her husband, Joel, gathered up their valuables and prepared to leave. With the help of firefighters and city park rangers to reroute the mudflow, the house was still undamaged Monday night.

That house and two other structures, one in Porter Ranch and another in West Hills, were red-tagged--declared too dangerous to occupy--a city building inspector said.

Another mudslide pushed a house on Pocahantas Avenue in Val Verde off its foundation, causing a gas leak when a propane line snapped.

At Warner Center in Woodland Hills, 12 employees were evacuated from a single-story office building after a 50-by-50-foot section of the roof caved in over an empty area, fire officials said. Battalion Chief Mark Stormes said a blockage in the drainage system apparently caused rain to accumulate until the weight grew too great for the roof supports.

At least three people who tried to muddle through flood waters in the Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys were endangered.

Witnesses said a woman was swept away in a swollen creek as she tried to wade out with a rope to a trapped minivan near a mobile home park off the Antelope Valley Freeway near San Fernando Road.

Three neighbors pulled her to safety about 300 yards down the creek, witnesses said. Chris Bright, 21, one of the rescuers, said the woman had lost her shirt and shoes in the current, but she managed to grab a tree on one side of the creek.

“She didn’t really want to let go of the tree. We had to peel her off,” Bright said.

Paramedics took her to Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital in Valencia.

Another woman, stranded in her pickup truck in rising flood waters at Lost Canyon Road and Oak Springs Canyon Road in Santa Clarita, was rescued about 2:40 p.m., the county Fire Department said. A tow truck driver was swept away in the same area, but firefighters reported that he reached safety by himself.

Four sprawling country estates in the MacMillan Ranch neighborhood in Santa Clarita flooded when an oak tree fell into a nearby creek, diverting water into the streets of the gated community.

About 60 prison inmates and a county Fire Department crew piled sandbags and removed silt from around the four homes on MacMillan Ranch Road. Stuntman Bob Minor said he was not concerned, but grateful, to have prison inmates around his home.

“This is a 9,800-square-foot home, the largest in MacMillan Ranch,” he said. “These guys really worked their butts off. I don’t know what we would have done without them.”

The storm was among the strongest in a series of rigorous weather systems that have punished the state since Feb. 1.

The rains that fell Monday raised the Civic Center rainfall total for the month to almost 12 inches, with five days to go.

That’s about an inch short of the February record of 13.37 inches set in 1884, a few months after the Krakatoa volcano exploded in the Sunda Channel west of Java, hurling a vast cloud of ash into the atmosphere that circled the globe and triggered rainfall records throughout the Northern Hemisphere.

The total in Los Angeles so far this season--which runs from July 1 through June 30--is more than 21 inches, about twice the normal amount for the date. But that’s peanuts compared to the Sonoma County hamlet of Cazadero, where more than 100 inches of rain has fallen.

In Ventura County, steady downpours dropped up to 7 inches of rain by midday Monday, with more continuing to fall into the night. Creeks in the Santa Paula area rose rapidly, and the channels and levees containing them threatened to give way.

Red lights flashing and sirens wailing, police fanned out through Santa Paula’s low-lying southeast corner, warning residents to pack up and leave.

“My boyfriend called me out and told me to get out of town,” said Sina Arellano, 28, as she pushed her belongings into a minivan and headed for higher ground.

At nightfall Monday, the waters began to recede and residents were allowed to return to their homes.

A Union Pacific railroad trestle was undermined by the surging flow of the Ventura River and will not be reopened to rail traffic for weeks. Amtrak service between Los Angeles and Seattle has been halted indefinitely by the damaged trestle.

The Ventura River washed over U.S. 101 in Ventura for most of the afternoon, cutting off all vehicular traffic on the only direct route between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.

In Malibu, residents stood by gamely in a steady downpour, watching the rocks tumble down the rain-soaked bluffs and onto Pacific Coast Highway.

“There’s kind of a perverse fascination with it, because it’s my house that’s in the way,” said Howard Schechter, 54.

“I’ve been here since 1975,” he said. “I’ve seen all this many times. When the mountain’s not coming down, then the ocean’s coming up. Then, in the summer, it’s the fires.”

Residents trying to get home on Pacific Coast Highway were told the road was impassable.

As the rain pelted down late Monday afternoon, waters rushed into the Sepulveda Basin in the San Fernando Valley floor at a rate of 15,000 cubic feet per second, said Fred-Otto Egeler, spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, which operates the Sepulveda Dam and its associated flood control system.

The water reached 687 feet above sea level, about 20 feet above normal but 36 feet under of the dam’s crest--a level that has never been reached, he said.

Water was being released at 10,000 cubic feet a second into the Los Angeles River, heading for the ocean, he said. “The system is working just the way it was designed to do.”

In Northern California, near San Francisco, storm-driven waves cresting up to 17 feet gnawed away oceanfront bluffs, leaving several homes in Pacifica dangling precariously over the sea.

“The power of the ocean is just awesome,” said Pacific Fire Marshal Steven Branvold.

Contributors: Times staff writers Daryl Kelley, David Colker, Nick Anderson, Miguel Bustillo, Mary Curtius, Abigail Goldman, Jose Cardenas, Peter Hong, Amy Oakes, Eric Rimbert and David Reyes contributed to this story, along with correspondents Julia Scheeres, Claire Vitucci and Dade Hayes and the Associated Press.