Point Reyes Light - November 16, 2000

Vandals flood Lagunitas offices

By Stephen Barrett

San Geronimo Valley merchants and residents are offering a $500 reward for information leading to the capture of the apparent vandal who stuck a garden hose through an upper story window of the Lagunitas Station building on Saturday and left the water running all night long.

Tenants of the building were alerted Sunday morning of the deliberate flooding and have spent the better part of this week repairing the damage to their offices.

"It’s ruined our office," said Kathy Peters, managing editor for Bay Area Naturally, whose upstairs headquarters was the first to get flooded before the water spread throughout the building. "We’re still trying to function amidst tremendous chaos."

Engineer Paul Torikian, who shares an office with Valley Travel directly below Bay Area Naturally, said the vandalism cost him about $1000 worth of office equipment, plus what will be a lost week of work trying to clean up the mess.

Fans & dehumidifiers

"We’re trying to dry out," he said. "There are five big fans here that we leave on all night and a big dehumidifier that sucks out a couple of gallons of water from the air every night."

Tenants said the vandal or vandals took a roughly 15-foot garden hose attached to a spigot outside, and either opened a window to the Bay Area Naturally offices from the outside or found the window already open. They threaded the hose through the open window, turned on the spigot, and disappeared.

Peters said the vandalism was discovered early Sunday morning by an employee opening the neighboring Lagunitas Store.

"It is weird that somebody would do that," said Marin Sheriff’s deputy Dave Rodriguez, who responded to the vandalism call. He said the reward should help encourage someone to provide more information. "Somebody knows something," he said, "and hopefully they will come forward."

Rumors

Torikian said he contributed a small amount to the reward fund but doubted whether it will produce any results. "I don’t think they can catch the culprit," he said. "There’s some rumors going around, but we don’t know."

At Bay Area Naturally, which was gearing up for a busy holiday season for its east coast publications, Peters said the timing could only have been worse if they were in the middle of publishing one of their quarterly resource guides.

She estimated her office suffered thousands of dollars worth of damage. "It’s really a horrible, hurtful act of vandalism," she said.

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