Storm Floods Camarillo Trailer Park : Weather: Rising water surrounds mobile home residents. Sheriff’s deputies airlift farm workers stranded in a field. More rain is expected.

A wind-whipped rainstorm blew into Ventura County early Thursday, flooding a Camarillo trailer park and forcing sheriff’s deputies to airlift a group of farm workers stranded in a nearby broccoli field.

Dozens of minor accidents were reported on rain-slick highways throughout the county, the California Highway Patrol said. One major-injury accident was reported on Tierra Rejada Road, east of California 23 near Moorpark, but no details were available late Thursday, CHP officials said.

Forecasters called for more heavy rainfall today, with scattered showers expected to bring another two to three inches of rain by Saturday.

“It’s going to be a wet one for the next few days,” said Steve Burback, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., which does forecasts for The Times. “We won’t have much of a break until about Tuesday.”

Thursday’s storm dropped slightly more than four inches of rain in the county’s backcountry, and as much as two inches in the cities of Thousand Oaks and Ventura and in outlying areas of Camarillo, according to figures from the Ventura County Flood Control District.

“We’ve had a lot of street flooding,” said Vicki Musgrove, a district hydrologist. “Camarillo was one of the hardest-hit areas.”

In addition to several road closures in the Ojai area, portions of Santa Clara Avenue, Beardsley Road and Central Avenue between Oxnard and Camarillo were shut down due to flooding.

At noon Thursday, about fifteen farm workers stranded in a flooded broccoli field on Central Avenue had to be airlifted to safety by a Ventura County sheriff’s helicopter.

“With the water rising around them, they didn’t think it was necessary to evacuate or to leave, until it was too late,” Sheriff’s Deputy Laura Burt said.

Floodwaters also inundated the Casa del Norte trailer park on Central Avenue in Camarillo. Dozens of Ventura County firefighters were dispatched to clear drains, stack sandbags and operate earthmoving equipment to protect the low-lying park from being completely overtaken by the rising water.

Their efforts appeared to pay off. Although water in the park measured one to three feet, none of the mobile homes, which sit on platforms high off the ground, were damaged and residents were allowed to stay on their property.

“I’m waiting for a rowboat,” resident Fred Kohr joked from the safety of his porch.

Kohr said he was enjoying a Bloody Mary early Thursday when he first noticed the rising waters creeping toward the cab of his pickup truck.

“I think I’ll have another Bloody Mary,” he said as maintenance workers slogged through knee-deep currents.

Gene Swartz, 89, who has lived at the trailer park for 22 years, was surprised by the amount of flooding in the park.

“I looked out my window and couldn’t believe what I saw,” said Swartz, who uses her front porch steps to measure the severity of each downpour.

At its worst, Thursday’s rain only covered two of the three steps, not enough to worry Swartz or to cause her to abandon her home for higher ground.

“At my age, it takes a lot to get me worried enough to go anywhere,” Swartz said.

Strawberry farmers on the Oxnard Plain were hit hard by the flooding.

Joe Doud, supervisor of the 500-acre Bob Jones Ranch, said that about 60% of his crop was damaged, translating into a loss of “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“We won’t care if it doesn’t rain again for two years,” a frustrated Doud said.

In Simi Valley, bolts of lightning ruptured an underground natural gas line on one street and shattered windows and light fixtures of a house in another area of town. No one was injured in either incident, Ventura County fire officials said.

In the first incident, a streak of lightning caused a minor gas leak when it struck the pavement in the 2200 block of Tracy Street, officials said.

The lightning strike, which according to witnesses rattled the ground, caused the two-inch underground pipe to break, said Marcia Secord, a spokeswoman for Southern California Gas Co.

Workers repaired the leak within an hour, she said.

Another bolt of lightning struck near a Simi Valley house in the 2000 block of Sargent Street, breaking windows and causing light fixtures to fall, said Sandi Wells, spokeswoman for the Ventura County Fire Department.

“It was so loud that the resident thought that it hit the house,” Wells said.

Meanwhile, Lake Casitas, the county’s largest reservoir, remained about 1 1/2 feet below the spillway, Casitas Municipal Water District officials said.

But there is only a slight chance that the dam will spill over, said Steve Wickstrum, the district’s senior civil engineer.

“It’s a possibility,” Wickstrum said. “But it would really have to pour for two or three days.” He estimated that it would have to rain about nine inches a day for three to four days for a spill to occur. Wickstrum said the last time the dam topped its spillway was in 1986.

Meanwhile, the Freeman diversion dam on the Santa Clara River was operating at full capacity Thursday and was expected to continue capturing about 500 acre-feet of water a day, said Fred J. Gientke, general manager of the United Water Conservation District, which operates the dam.

“There’s a small amount of water spilling over the top,” he said.

Once diverted, the water is used to replenish the county’s ground-water basins. An acre-foot of water is enough to supply a family of four for one year.

The district’s reservoir at Lake Piru was also overflowing, he said. The district was diverting some of the water to spreading ponds in Saticoy and El Rio, but the majority of the water was flowing directly into the ocean.

“There’s so much water that we have no place left to store it,” he said.

Times staff writers Sara Catania and Timothy Williams, and correspondent Patrick McCartney contributed to this story.

County Rainfall

Here are rainfall figures from 8 a.m. Wednesday to 9 p.m. Thursday from the Ventura County Flood Control District. Oct. 1 is the beginning of the official rain year.

Rainfall Rainfall Normal rainfall Location since Wednesday since Oct. 1 to date Camarillo 0.97 15.08 8.76 Casitas Dam 2.11 24.76 15.44 El Rio 1.49 15.50 9.86 Fillmore 2.22 21.39 12.49 Moorpark 1.25 16.37 9.53 Ojai 2.92 27.51 13.91 Upper Ojai 1.91 26.15 15.04 Oxnard 0.72 13.29 9.51 Piru 1.86 21.40 11.16 Santa Paula 2.47 19.66 11.66 Simi Valley 1.85 16.90 9.20 Thousand Oaks 2.19 18.78 9.94 Ventura Govt. Center 2.08 16.40 10.51

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