6 Families Flee as a Hillside Edges Toward Houses : Santa Clarita: Fearing that rains will send mud crashing into homes, city building inspectors order evacuations on cul-de-sac.

Six frightened families fled their Santa Clarita houses Friday to escape a waterlogged hillside that cracked and was slowly slipping down on them.

By late Friday, the hill above the 19000 block of Maplebay Court had not collapsed, but authorities feared weekend rains would send a wall of mud crashing into the homes.

“All the property up above is just cracking like crazy,” said Marian Mohler, an insurance supervisor who was ordered to evacuate her house by 7 p.m., two hours after Santa Clarita building inspectors arrived. “We’re hoping that if it comes down, it just smacks the house--not takes the whole thing with it.”

The inspectors ordered the houses evacuated after discovering a 50-foot-long fissure in the steep slope above the cul-de-sac.

“We’re not just blowing smoke--this is serious,” said inspector John Robinson.

The crack grew from a half-inch wide to 1 1/2 inches wide in less than two hours, Robinson said.

The hill rises at a 60-degree angle above the one-story, 25-year-old houses, which residents said were worth about $200,000 to $250,000.

“We probably couldn’t get $50 for the house today,” Mohler said ruefully.

Crews from the Los Angeles County Fire Department dug trenches and placed sandbags around the six houses after turning off utilities, then covered the hillside with sheets of plastic, in the hopes preventing the rain from further saturating the soil.

Robinson said the slope became waterlogged partly because residents failed to properly clear sagebrush and debris from storm drains on the hill. As a result, water soaked the hillside instead of flowing into the streets below.

Aware of the crack behind their homes by midafternoon Friday, residents had called the city to request sandbags to prevent erosion.

When city crews arrived with the sandbags, they recognized the seriousness of the situation and the evacuation was ordered.

Many slopes above houses in the hilly city are mudslides in the making, said Jeff Kolin, a deputy city manager.

“We’ve got so much of this waiting to happen that we don’t even know about yet,” he said.