THE DELUGE : Residents Defend Homes Against the Rain and Mud : Weather: The storm brings out anxiety but also camaraderie among neighbors in hillside areas.

Peggy Malngren didn’t even stop to put on her rain boots Wednesday. She was too busy fighting to keep water and mud from sliding into her Woodland Hills home.

“I’m trying to save my house,” said a panicked Malngren, shod in tennis shoes, as she rushed into a fire station on Canoga Avenue to pick up sandbags.

“I need as many as I can get,” she told the firefighters. In a few minutes, she had her allotment of 25 bags and dashed off for her home on Esparto Road.

The 36-year-old medical secretary was one of hundreds of San Fernando Valley residents who worked feverishly Wednesday to defend their homes against rain and mud--and to prepare them for watery onslaughts expected later this week.

In many hillside neighborhoods, the storm brought out not only collective anxiety, but a camaraderie as neighbors and families hastily banded together to fill sandbags, dig drainage ditches or send their children off to higher, drier ground. Carrie McKitterick, a preschool teacher, said she rushed home after her niece called her at work, screaming that mud was pouring into the back yard of her house on Dumetz Road.

McKitterick and Malngren, facing similar troubles a couple of hillsides apart, showed up at Fire Station 84 within five minutes of each other Wednesday morning, like hundreds of other frightened property owners.

“My hill is sliding up on Dumetz!” McKitterick said after slogging through calf-high water to reach the station. In a few minutes, she was home and, along with her husband and sister, shored up a failing retaining wall and dug trenches through their lush landscaping to divert the water and mud.

“This is the scariest thing,” McKitterick, 35, said, as she hoisted sandbags into place. Mud oozed past her as she worked. “It just comes down. It just doesn’t stop.”

But even McKitterick could laugh when her sister, while trying to pull her out of the mud, slipped and fell backward into the muck while McKitterick fell in the opposite direction.

“You laugh and joke,” she said later. “What else can you do? You can’t cry about it. What a way to redo your yard.”

Indeed, when the three diggers discovered an old Malibu Barbie in the ooze, they renamed her Mudslide Barbie.

The mood was more tense a few blocks away on Esparto Road.

Malngren and her neighbors knew it was time to start fighting the storm about 10 a.m. when clumps of mud began sliding down a hill that fronts the curvy, scenic street.

“I heard this crash and thunder, like an earthquake, and saw the mountain coming down,” said Candy Hawthorne, who watched the scene from her kitchen. Hawthorne sent her three daughters to her parents’ house and started calling neighbors to warn them of the potential danger. She began with a call to Malngren.

Malngren rushed home from work and saw that a 30-year-old, 25-foot-high pine tree had uprooted and fallen onto her house. She headed off to the Fire Department.

Neighbors still remember how a mudslide hit the Malngren house during heavy rains in 1978, trapping a previous owner in waist-deep mud. Malngren’s husband, Jeff, said the couple, who live there with their two children, had not had such problems since they bought their house six years ago.

The tree, it turned out, appeared to have caused little damage. Meanwhile, friends and neighbors descended on the Malngrens’ house, shoveling the heavy mud into 75 burlap sacks to form water barriers. A little boy lugged a sandbag in a red wagon.

By the time skies cleared in the afternoon, they had built channels of boards and cinder blocks to carry water away from the house and into the road.

But the fears of the day remained.

“I’m not looking forward to the future,” Malngren said. “I’m nervous about the next few days.”

By then, most of the neighbors had left and Malngren looked exhausted. And she still hadn’t changed into her rain boots.