FREEWAYS FLOODING IN THE FAST LANE.

Byline: Jesse Hiestand Daily News Staff Writer

The fast lanes flooded on the Ventura Freeway and many other freeways in Los Angeles on Wednesday - just as they do whenever there's so much rain.

The California Highway Patrol calls freeway flooding just a fact of life in Los Angeles and drivers need to be cautious.

Caltrans blames the 1994 Northridge Earthquake for knocking freeway slabs out of alignment.

But one of the men who designed and built freeways in the San Fernando Valley and other areas of the Southland says that when the Ventura Freeway was rebuilt a few years ago and the left shoulder was turned into an extra lane, no accommodation was made for runoff.

``Traffic got so heavy that we wanted to use the left shoulder to carry traffic,'' said Gary Bork, a retired Caltrans chief of traffic operations who spent 42 years designing and building freeways for District 7, which covers Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

``The design in the old days was that the (left) shoulder would flood and now they're using it as a lane, so it floods.''

Caltrans officials said that after the Northridge Quake, some freeway slabs settled in ways that encourage water to pool near center dividers.

Prime examples of ``slab settlement'' are on the No. 1 lanes on the Ventura Freeway between the Hollywood and San Diego freeways, said Caltrans spokesman Vincent Moreno.

``We know of a lot of stretches of the 101 that are affected by this pooling affect, but it's the same thing - these slabs have settled and water goes to the lowest point,'' Moreno said.

He said Caltrans is looking for solutions but it does not normally rain enough here to justify the expense of installing and maintaining drainage pipes along all freeways.

With cars hydroplaning in the floodwaters and skidding, the CHP reported 525 crashes on freeways during the storm - more than three times more than the previous Wednesday, a dry day.

West Valley CHP Officer Dwight McDonald said that while freeway flooding contributes to crashes, speeding drivers share the blame.

He also said freeway washouts are not entirely preventable: ``It's one of those unfortunate things. If we have a deluge, the drains can only handle so much.''

Flooding on the Golden State Freeway near Lankershim Boulevard in Sun Valley was so severe Wednesday that the CHP had to shut down two lanes for about two hours.

Other areas of California also have freeway drainage problems like Los Angeles, said Caltrans spokesman Russell Snyder in Sacramento.

``Our standards for freeways are pretty much the same statewide. In fact, they are the model for the nation,'' he said. ``They are designed to accommodate heavy rainfall in drains and culverts but in instances where there's a tremendous amount of water in a short time, there's no amount of drainage that can handle that.''

Bork said that far-left emergency lanes were intended to provide a 30-foot-wide channel to carry runoff to drainage pipes running parallel to the freeway, keeping water off all but two feet of the fast lane.

But when emergency lanes were converted to fast lanes and center dividers were replaced by solid concrete barriers, engineers had to find new solutions to freeway drainage, he said.

Bork said he and another engineer developed a ``water-carrying divider'' that is now used on a few stretches of Southland freeways. In that design, 18-inch drainage pipes encased in concrete beneath the barrier carry water that enters through ground-level drainage slots in the barrier, he said.

Moreno said Caltrans officials are concerned about the potential hazards of pooling water on freeways and have requested funding to solve the problem by grinding smooth the jumbled slabs and resurfacing those areas with an asphalt/concrete mixture.

``It creates a solid plane for water to drain off,'' he said.

Even in rain-weary Seattle, which has an extensive drainage system for its three mainW highways, the same type of flooding occurs, said Bill Southern, a spokesman for the Washington Department of Transportation.

``You would think Seattlites would be accustomed to the rain, but when it rains here our (freeway) system breaks down,'' he said Wednesday.

To supplement drains, road engineers in Seattle have been cutting small grooves across their freeways to drain water to the right shoulder, he said. This also helps prevent hydroplaning, he said.