La Cañada braces for storms

AP Photo

Worker Jose Matios works to clean up mud and debris from Pat Anderson's home in La Canada Flintridge, Calif. on Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010. Some homeowners in mud-ravaged foothill towns north of Los Angeles packed their cars and fled Tuesday as evacuation orders took hold and a new winter storm approached.

The rains aren’t offering much of a break in the La Cañada Foothills.

At about noon, the drizzle fed cute little streams that pushed pebbles along the gutters of Ocean View Boulevard.

This weekend those streams turned into what one homeowner described as "tsunamis of mud that swept up cars and tore homes from their foundations.

Tara Durkan had just finished remodeling her two-story home.

"My house looked like Architectural Digest on Friday night and it looks like Armageddon on Saturday morning," she said. "It looked like Escape From L.A. when I put my kids in my truck and went down the street."

A dozen men tossed boxes of muddied children’s books and an air hockey table from her garage into a dump truck. Higher up on Ocean View Boulevard, toward the rainclouds, cars remained in muddied front yards where the debris flow had left them. Official notices hung on doorways like toe tags in the morgue.

Mudslides on PhotoPeach

Beatrice Cirar’s house of 40 years escaped severe damage, but her front yard didn’t.

"I had the beautiful lawn and I had roses all the way to the top, flowers, you can’t even tell," she said. "And there was a one foot brick wall, it’s gone. All that is gone."

Just then a thunderclap echoed through the foothills.

"Just a minute God," she said tongue in cheek.

That thunder brought more rain that swelled the trickles of water in the gutter into more ominous streams that bullied rocks down the hill.