January 14, 2005
USA Today
Photo: Jan. 13: Cars travel on a freeway surrounded by floodwaters in Baker, Calif.
CORONA, Calif. — Authorities worried about rainwater built up behind a Riverside County dam were evacuating more than 800 homes as a precaution early Friday.
A police spokesman said he believed there was a small leak in the Prado Dam, but a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates and oversees the dam, said there was no leak.
"We're releasing water," said Fred-Otto Egeler, spokesman for the Los Angeles district of the Corps of Engineers. "It's being retained behind the dam and we're making normal releases at this moment."
Officers were evacuating about 330 mobile homes and 500 other homes east of the dam, Police Sgt. Jerry Rodriguez said.
Water was rising behind the dam and "the dam is not able to support it, so for precautionary reasons we're evacuating the homes. ... My understanding is there's a leak in the dam," he said.
An evacuation center was set up at Corona High School. Crews could be seen on television reports working at a berm between the dam and the evacuated neighborhoods, located about 50 miles east-southeast of downtown Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, to the north, rescuers were flying in food and medical supplies to more than 100 people trapped in a small Angeles National Forest mountain community by a storm-swollen river that has washed out three bridges.
The raging San Gabriel River has cut off ground access to the approximately 135 permanent residents of Follows Camp, which is tucked into a canyon in the rugged forest about 30 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles.
"We're completely separated from the rest of the world," said Lt. Tim Dowling of the Follows Camp Volunteer Fire Department.
With supplies running low, a Los Angeles County sheriff's search and rescue team flew in food and medical supplies on Thursday. The rescuers also flew out a heart patient needing special medication and a 10-year-old boy who had been visiting friends when he was trapped in the camp with them.
Elsewhere in the region, officials said they would reopen Highway 101 on Friday. The freeway linking Los Angeles to Santa Barbara was shut down this week by a series of mudslides, and had been used as a staging area during the search for survivors of the massive slide in La Conchita.
The San Bernardino Mountain resort communities of Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear were expecting reduced holiday weekend traffic with the continued closure of Highway 330 and Highway 18 due to storm damage. Crews said the roads, key routes into the mountains, weren't likely to reopen for another week.
In Follows Camp, flooding had damaged several cabins and washed out half of the community's fire equipment, including a fire engine that fell into the river. There was also concern that soil left loose by last year's brush fire could slide down into the camp.
The river's water level had risen 22 feet above normal at one point, but it was slowly subsiding, Dowling said.
"It's been tense around here," Dowling said. "We're running out of food, so when we get our food shipped in it should keep the edge off things."
Dowling said he and many residents are drawn to the community by its rustic beauty. The area was originally populated as a gold-mining site in 1862. Follows Camp was founded three decades later by Ralph Follows, an Englishman who moved to San Gabriel Canyon in hopes of finding a cure for his tuberculosis.
About 200 people rents cabins from the campsite's current owners, Patricia Jones and her two sons.
"It's one of the most beautiful places on Earth," Dowling said. "Now it looks like a martian landscape ... It feels like an end of an era to some degree because it's going to be tough to rebuild."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,144357,00.html