Aliso Creek Faces Day After : Damage: It will take months--and millions--to clean up Ben Brown’s resort. But the South Laguna landmark has survived floods before.

The morning after roaring Aliso Creek broke its banks and ripped through Ben Brown’s Aliso Creek Resort, general manager Ed Slymen bustled around the compound Thursday to assess the damage.

The nine-hole golf course that winds through scenic Aliso Canyon looked like a giant sand trap, with up to two feet of silt and mud covering some sections. Debris from three 30-foot wooden bridges that once spanned the creek was strewn on its banks in broken piles. The swimming pool, filled in with mud and broken shrubs, resembled a swamp.

Slymen was in for another surprise when he unlocked the doors of some newly remodeled suites: Several inches of mud caked the new carpets, pieces of furniture were overturned and the beds had washed through the glass windows after a four-foot wall of water slammed into a section of the resort.

“We have to let this sink in,” he said, whistling in wonderment at the destruction. “It’s hard to believe, but we really have to do the best we can to clean this entire place up. It’s going to take months.”

Slymen could not say exactly how much damage the floods caused but acknowledged that repairs will cost “a lot of millions.” He and an army of employees worked throughout the day, removing debris, salvaging furniture--and bracing for another rainstorm.

The damage brought by heavy rains Wednesday was not altogether unexpected. After all, the creek is where runoff collects from the thousands of new homes in Aliso Viejo and Laguna Niguel and further upstream, then flows on to the Pacific Ocean. Previous floods have also damaged the resort.

Employees recalled Thursday that floods damaged the golf course and the resort in 1969 and also forced guests to be evacuated.

But Slymen and others said they were shocked by the swiftness of Wednesday’s deluge. Slymen, who had been placing sandbags near the creek to prevent the water from entering the newly remodeled cottages, said floodwaters rose “at least three feet in less than 10 minutes,” imperiling guests in suites nearest the creek.

About five guests who were trapped in their rooms were rescued after climbing into the front bucket of a backhoe.

Up the creek, about 16 employees at the South Coast Water District sewage treatment plant were virtually marooned after a wooden bridge linking the resort with their compound was washed away. They climbed to the roof of a building and were lifted out by a rescue helicopter from El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

A skeleton crew operated the plant Thursday, but a few district employees returned just to survey the damage.

“I can’t believe the strength of the water,” said Dave Henry, an instrument technician, who was among those rescued by the Marines. “The bridge (to the treatment plant) just snapped like a twig.”

Three new bridges that were recently built for golf carts to cross the creek were also swept away by the boiling waters. The thick wooden beams snapped under the water’s pressure, while their concrete pilings were ripped out of the creek bed and were nowhere to be found Thursday. Workers speculated that the pilings were swept into the ocean, along with the lumber and uprooted trees.

Several yards from the creek, a pair of deer grazed under an olive tree on the fairway as four workers used shovels and rakes to shave a layer of mud from the seventh green.

“If we don’t do this, the green will rot under the mud in a few days,” said 71-year-old Severo Mercado, the golf course’s groundskeeper. “This doesn’t look like a golf course at all, it looks like a farm.”

A backhoe operator scraped piles of mud from the inn’s parking lot and moved huge sheets of asphalt that were torn from the roadway by swirling floodwaters.

Other workers used the resort’s golf carts to ferry lamps, furniture and other fixtures from the suites.

Slymen said he and the resort’s owners have decided to prepare for the rain expected to strike the region again this weekend.

“If the rains are going to fall any harder than (Wednesday), then God help us all,” Slymen said.