Most evacuation orders lifted as Southern California storm eases

Evacuees in Calif allowed back into homes

LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE, Calif. — Hundreds of evacuees were allowed Friday to return to their foothill homes as Southern California’s latest storm dissipated into occasional thunderstorms.

As rainfall drenched the region earlier in the week, the homes had faced possible debris flows from a 250-square-mile area of the San Gabriel Mountains, northeast of Los Angeles, burned bare last summer by wildfire.

But after public works experts determined that the ground was safe Friday, mandatory evacuation orders were lifted for all but a handful of streets. In Los Angeles, officials canceled evacuations for all but one home, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said.

Nearly 2,000 homes had been under evacuation orders and some were damaged by minor flooding, officials said.

But some people never left, despite repeated official pleas to do so.

On a nearly deserted cul-de-sac in La Canada Flintridge, George Wiktor watched from his front yard on Friday as crews shoveled mud from the street into a truck. Sandbags had diverted a mudslide around homes.

“My home is fine. There is no drama here,” said Wiktor, one of two homeowners on the street who refused to heed evacuation orders.

At a news conference, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency for San Bernardino County, citing county estimates of 124 homes damaged by the storm and costs of more than $11 million for emergency response, building damage and debris cleanup.

States of emergency already had been declared for Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Francisco and Siskiyou counties. The declarations will allow the counties to obtain state reimbursement for much of their damage and cleanup costs, although state officials said it was unlikely that the damage was serious enough for them to qualify for federal emergency aid.

Repairs crews, meanwhile, worked around the clock to restore power to thousands left in the dark when lashing wind and falling trees knocked down power lines.

At a news conference, Schwarzenegger said 82,000 people remained without power throughout the state.

That included around 2,000 in Blythe, near the Arizona border, where a tornado on Thursday knocked down 80 poles, Southern California Edison spokeswoman Lois Pitter Bruce said.

The National Weather Service warned of scattered showers and thunderstorms through Friday evening that could drop up to an inch of rain an hour at times. There also could be an additional 4 to 8 inches of snow in the mountains.

The weeklong series of storms brought 8 to 10 inches of rain to the Los Angeles-area mountains, while lower-lying areas got about half that, weather service meteorologist Eric Boldt said.

Authorities said an extensive flood-control system was working, but many of the basins designed to catch debris-laden runoff from fire-scarred mountains were full as the region entered a fifth straight day of rain.

The weather was expected to dry out over the weekend before yet another storm front moved in.

Neighboring Arizona also was pounded with rain and snow that prompted a search for a boy who was swept away by rising waters, flooded an unknown number of homes in another community and left several hikers stranded.

A search was under way early Friday for the 6-year-old boy who was swept about 70 miles north of Phoenix near the community of Mayer. Dwight D’Evelyn, a spokesman for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department, said the boy was presumed dead.

In western Arizona, a 2-foot surge of runoff flooded streets and an unknown number of homes early Friday in Wenden, a community of 500 people located about 100 miles west of Phoenix. No one was reported missing or injured.