Battening Down in Laguna : Weather: Residents of fire-scarred area face storm by stacking sandbags and keeping watch. No major damage, injuries are reported in Monday's downpour.

Battening Down in Laguna : Weather: Residents of fire-scarred area face storm by stacking sandbags and keeping watch. No major damage, injuries are reported in Monday’s downpour.

By DAVID REYES and LEN HALL

Feb. 8, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

LAGUNA BEACH — Jenifer Burge sighed in relief as a downpour subsided during the persistent rainstorm Monday.

“We usually love it when it rains out here, but we have a different outlook now,” Burge said. “Ever since the fires, we are constantly reminded of the threat of a flood.”

Burge, a longtime resident of the Canyon Acres community, said she has perfected what’s become a ritual in this flood-prone canyon area. Part of her family’s storm preparation list includes stacking sandbags, parking cars off the street for safe keeping and maintaining vigils with other worried neighbors.

Although Burge’s neighborhood streets were slick with mud, no major damage or injuries were reported in what weather forecasters were calling the worst storm of the season so far.

Bringing windy gusts up to 35 miles per hour and periods of heavy rain, the storm failed to cause significant problems in a community that has learned to prepare for disaster since the Oct. 27 fire rampaged through, destroying 366 homes and leaving barren hillsides ripe for mudslides.

When the storm first struck late Sunday, Burge and her Canyon Acres neighbors gathered in the darkness outside their homes, checking the streets for mud or flooding, she said.

“We gathered on the street and helped each other,” Burge said. “We moved sandbags and drank coffee. It’s a great way to meet your neighbors, out in the street in the middle of the night.”

Burge now leaves a pair of boots on the porch outside the front door, “so I can just slip into them when the rain starts.”

While residents did their best to protect their homes, firefighters staffed the city’s emergency operations center, which during rainstorms becomes a hub of activity for dispatching emergency workers to troubled areas.

Reseeding programs since the fire, which scarred nearly 17,000 acres, have restored only some burned areas with patches of young grass, mitigating the flood danger, said Laguna Beach firefighter Patrick Brennan.

Brennan was one of five firefighters who staffed the emergency center at 9 p.m. Sunday and remained through the night.

The center is on the second floor of a bank building in the downtown area. The center serves as a logistic and communications headquarters. Its walls are crowded with maps and charts on logistics for staging equipment and crews.

Another part houses the technical support team where Brennan works collecting weather data information. Using a computer that hooks into the National Weather Service, Brennan said he doesn’t forecast the weather, but is able to measure actual amount of rainfall with the help of a second, sophisticated system.

“We also tie into a system that’s used by flood control agencies,” Brennan said. “They have 400 gauges that collect rain information from Point Conception to the north to Point Loma in San Diego County. This actual information is best for determining when we have to order evacuations.”

Brennan said it began raining in Laguna Beach at 11:35 p.m. Sunday. When the storm intensified to half an inch of rain, the Fire Department went to an alert stage about 4 a.m.

“The alert stage allowed us to bring in additional equipment, such as a lifeguard swift-water rescue team, municipal services and EMA,” the county Environmental Management Agency, Brennan said. “The public works crews have backhoes and graders and we stage them on Laguna Canyon Road near Canyon Acres.”

City officials beefed up the emergency operations center with weather information after an intense rainstorm dumped nearly two-thirds of an inch in a short time, causing flooding and mudslides on Nov. 11, two weeks after the devastating fire.

Citing a hydrologist’s report, Brennan said Laguna Beach has a soil saturation time of only 15 minutes. That means, Brennan said, that from the beginning of a storm with a potential to dump more than half an inch of rain, the city can expect flood conditions within 15 minutes.

“We had one storm that dumped half an inch in an hour and that gave us problems,” Brennan said. “Today’s storm brought a half an inch of rain over a five-hour period so we were able to handle it.”

For canyon residents, the fear of flooding remains real.

One of Burge’s canyon neighbors, Pete Ott, has placed 6,000 sandbags around his home, which was one of the last left standing that far in the canyon after the fire. If the flood or mudslides hit, his home will bear the brunt of the rushing waters.

“It’s a constant tense situation,” Ott said. “We monitor the weather like we never have before.”