Hundreds Flee Flood Water; State Braces for New Storm

Heavy rains continued to batter storm-drenched Northern California on Wednesday, swelling rivers and reservoirs, knocking out electrical power and forcing people in a string of small towns along the cresting Russian River to spend a frantic New Year’s Day fleeing their homes for evacuation centers.

The deluge--from a powerful series of storms that is expected to strike again over the weekend--forced the closure of Yosemite National Park, where dispirited travelers were turned away at barricades. It also thwarted the search for three hikers missing since Dec. 26 on snow-shrouded Mt. Shasta, authorities said.

The storm slammed hardest into California’s coastal wine country, where homes were flooded and fields and vineyards sank under mucky lakes. No damage estimates were available, but 18 counties declared local emergencies.

Although Southern California was spared the flooding, the storm’s destructive fury reached the coastline here, as well: In Redondo Beach, 12-foot waves swept more than 20 sightseers and fishers off the breakwater rocks. Ten people--among them several children--were seriously injured and transported to a medical triage center, said Lt. Mike Cunningham, a Los Angeles County lifeguard.

More of the same thundering surf was expected today as the front moved south, bringing a 30% chance of showers tonight and Friday in Los Angeles, with partial clearing Saturday, forecasters said.

Rainfall was expected to diminish today in heavily flooded portions of the state after the storm dumped 1.47 inches Wednesday in San Francisco, 3.42 inches in Santa Rosa and 7.88 inches in Blue Canyon in the Sierra Nevada near Lake Tahoe.

However, the respite was expected to be too brief to allow swollen rivers and reservoirs to drain, said meteorologist Jon Erdman of WeatherData Inc., which supplies forecasts for The Times. A new storm, now moving through Hawaii, is expected to pummel California by Saturday night.

“Northern and Central California . . . really can’t take any more rain,” Erdman said. “What they need is four days to a week of drying, and some sunshine, and they’re just not going to get that.”

The new storm, though slightly smaller than the current one, is expected to drop an inch or two of rain in northern parts of the state and up to four inches in some mountain regions, Erdman said.

“Areas like the Napa River, the Russian River, they’ll have some flooding problems to deal with,” he said.

Those two rivers run roughly parallel, zigzagging southward through the coastal vineyards of Napa, Mendocino and Sonoma counties and emptying into San Francisco Bay. The Lower Russian River, inhabited by about 6,000 people, was the site of the state’s worst flooding Wednesday, authorities said.

Dozens of homes were evacuated in the towns of Forestville, Rio Del, Hollydale, Hacienda, Summerhome Park, Guerneville, Guernewood Park, Vacation Beach, Northwood, Monte Rio and Villa Grande, said Janice Atkinson of Sonoma County’s Office of Emergency Services.

Emergency shelters were open, but authorities had not yet determined how many people had fled or how many homes were damaged.

“We can’t even get in at this point, and the river is still on the rise,” Atkinson said.

In Monte Rio, a tiny Russian River town that has taken some of the worst pounding in recent days, firefighters put on wetsuits Wednesday and took to small boats to rescue families and their pets from areas bracing for possible floods.

“So far, we’ve taken out eight people, three dogs, one cat and two bunnies,” said Rita Conway-O’Neill, an emergency medical technician with the Monte Rio Fire Department.

Standing in her wetsuit in the pouring rain, Conway-O’Neill said that people seemed more willing to evacuate this year than in 1995 or 1986, when floods inundated the communities of the Lower Russian River and forced emergency evacuations of hundreds of people.

“In 1995, people were very reluctant to leave their homes,” Conway-O’Neill said. “They figured: You live on the river, the water comes up and it goes down. But this time, a lot of them are leaving at the first sign of trouble.”

The Russian River crested at a record 48 feet during the 1995 floods, 16 feet above its flood level. Officials had predicted that it would pass that mark late Wednesday, but by evening they said the crest might fall short of the record.

“This is the first time we left,” said evacuee Kim Menary, 41, who stood in the Monte Rio fire station awaiting a county bus that would take her family to Sebastopol. She and her daughters, Krystal, 16, and Amanda, 12, had grabbed some clothes, their dog and their cat before National Guard members arrived in a military truck and scooped them aboard.

“We’ll stay with my mother in Sebastapol,” Menary said, remembering rains in 1986 and 1995 when her basement and ground floor were flooded.

“It is always a mess to clean up,” she said. “It will take us a couple of days to get it back together. But we’re some of the fortunate ones. We have someplace to go.”

Evacuations were complicated by rugged terrain, narrow winding roads and thick stands of trees that make the landscape along the Russian River one of the state’s most beautiful vistas. By midmorning, several feet of water had sloshed across all roads leading into Guerneville, effectively sealing off the town of 2,000 to all but emergency crews.

Downed tree branches, leaves and other debris littered roads throughout the area as rain continued to pound without letup. Dormant grapevines poked through the several feet of water that covered acres of vineyards.

While some residents seemed resigned to the hardship of evacuation, others made the difficult decision to stay with their homes--come hell or high water. Since the 1995 flood, many residents have raised their houses and stocked up on emergency supplies, “and those people are prepared for a siege,” said Harry Martin, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry.

In Sebastopol, Jon Aplin was running the Red Cross shelter that opened Monday. In 1995, 250 people were evacuated to the shelter for as long as 10 days--most of them Guerneville residents.

“We have only seen about 70 people so far this time,” Aplin said. “That’s because people refuse to come off their property. But if the predictions are right, and the river goes to 49 feet tonight, they won’t have a choice.”

While children clustered around the shelter’s television, watching a cartoon video, a dozen adults sprawled on cots in the cavernous dormitory, some sleeping, others staring blankly toward the ceiling.

Brian Rice, 38, sat with three of his friends and worried about his dog, a German shepherd, that he left in his Guerneville home Tuesday night while attending a New Year’s Eve party in Santa Rosa.

“When we tried to drive home this morning, the CHP stopped us and told us we couldn’t go into town,” Rice said. “They wouldn’t let me get my dog.”

This was the third time Guerneville has flooded in the 10 years Rice has lived there--he lost everything he owned in 1995, when his home filled almost to the ceiling with water--but he remains undaunted. He said he will never move.

“I’m just a river rat, I guess,” Rice said.

In more mountainous eastern areas, rain and snow forced dozens of road closures and brought a halt to efforts to find three hikers who left Thursday to ascend 14,162-foot Mt. Shasta.

The three hikers left from a trail head at Bunny Flat, at 7,200 feet, where two feet of snow had fallen in recent days, said Susan Gravenkamp, a spokeswoman for the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Department. Heavy rain was drenching the area Wednesday, making it impossible to fly search helicopters, she said.

Mudslides and huge boulders blocked the road to the area, preventing search crews from getting there on the ground, Gravenkamp said. In addition, there was severe avalanche danger.

“It doesn’t look like we’ll be able to do anything [Thursday],” she said. “We think it will be some time before they will be able to clear that slide and get the road open.”

The three missing hikers were identified as Ted Knudsen, 27, of San Rafael, his brother Tim Knudsen, 23, of Solvang, and Sascha Paris, 27, of San Jose.

“Hopefully, they’re in a tent or they’ve built a snow cave or something like that,” Gravenkamp said, but conditions were very bleak. “It’s real severe weather on the mountain right now.”

To the south, in the granite peaks of the Sierra Nevada outside Reno, heavy rains pushed the Truckee River above its banks, flooding houses and businesses. Hundreds of residents were forced to evacuate, and mudslides blocked highways in the Reno-Tahoe area.

“What we’re talking about are 100-year flood conditions,” said National Weather Service hydrologist Gary Barbato. “We’re expecting the worst flooding on the Truckee since 1963,” when a devastating flood caused millions of dollars in damage to downtown Reno.

While residents have been uprooted, vacationers have seen their plans of a New Year’s getaway in the snowy mountains ruined.

Yosemite National Park and the Badger Pass ski area were declared closed about noon Wednesday, and park officials later began evacuating campgrounds on the floor of Yosemite Valley, where the Merced River churned and spilled over its banks, said park spokesman Kendell Thompson.

Traffic heading to the park--light, anyway, because of the weeklong rains--was being stopped at barricades, where travelers wondered how to salvage vacation plans.

“We’d planned three days and two nights,” said one frustrated tour operator, Welbert Chang, 38, who was stopped outside Yosemite with a busload of 28 Chinese and Taiwanese tourists who had arrived from Los Angeles. “One day in Yosemite, the second day to San Francisco, the third to Monterey Bay and Hearst Castle.

“But now we can’t get into Yosemite. They say the water’s over the road.”

Stymied tourists poured into the Parkline restaurant just outside Yosemite’s Arch Rock entrance, consoling themselves with coffee and a bite to eat while the chocolate-brown Merced River raged past them.

“We’ve had three buses this afternoon alone,” said restaurant employee Nicole Wagner, 27, who described the river’s rapid rise by pointing to a massive rock submerged under cascading waters. “That rock was exposed this morning.”

The spectacle of water crashing on the rocks drew dozens of appreciative watchers to Southern California’s ocean breakwaters Wednesday, but the grandeur turned to horror in Redondo Beach when a monstrous wave swept men, women and young children into the surf.

“There were all kinds of people . . . in the water,” said Lt. Dave Story, a Los Angeles County lifeguard. “Some of the women were crying and I was really worried about the children. Some of them were only 5.”

Ten people were injured, but lifeguards were able to get to them quickly because they were washed in right outside the lifeguard station, Story said. Otherwise, there might have been tragedy.

“We got them out without much trouble with our two boats,” he said. “We had been waiting all day because the waves were big.”

Times staff writer Tim Reiterman contributed to this story.

* NORTHWEST RAINS EASE: Flooding and mudslides continue in storms’ aftermath. A14

* MORE RAIN FOR O.C.: A storm could bring more light rain to the county tonight. (Orange County Edition, B3)