Wall of Mud Buckles Woodland Hills Street : Weather: Some residents blame the slide on builders who they said created the slope by filling a ravine. Others just say it’s the rains.

Muddy water rushed down the street, over curbs and around the feet of Woodland Hills residents who braved the rain Sunday morning to watch a wall of mud slide toward their homes, twisting the pavement as an earthquake might.

Technicians worked feverishly to turn off gas and water mains in the street as a narrow, 30-yard-long horizontal gash halfway up the hillside--a concave dirt slope rising above the corner of Cerrillos Drive and Buenaventura Street--grew ominously. Mud below the gash slid slowly down the slope, burying the sidewalk.

Pressure from the mud ruptured a 20-yard-long stretch of pavement on Cerrillos, buckling the asphalt as if pushed from below.

Only one house on the 22200 block of Buenaventura was evacuated, although residents of surrounding houses were advised to be ready to move if the hill gave way.

“It’s pretty freaky,” said Marisa Peck, an 8-year-old who took refuge from the rain at a neighbor’s house.

Other children excitedly ran from house to house as their parents and neighbors appeared to take the slide in stride. Many huddled under porches, sipping coffee, outwardly calm but betraying concern.

“This is not a pleasant experience,” said Nancy Cornell, who lives at the base of the slope. “My concern is that once the hillside comes loose, it won’t stop.”

Cornell’s daughter, Liz Zawatsky, said neighbors called the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power about 9 p.m. Saturday because “small geysers started popping out from the street.” DWP workers responded to fix a broken water main.

But Sunday morning, Zawatsky noticed that the street had buckled and ruptured. Southern California Gas Co. and DWP workers shut off gas and water to five homes, then bored holes into the road to reroute lines underneath.

Steve Malinoski, a DWP supervisor, said he arrived at the scene at 4:30 a.m. after the pavement began to shift. Chunks of asphalt ripped loose, as if broken in an earthquake. He said he had not seen such damage on a street since the Southland’s severe rains during the early 1980s.

Malinoski said stopping the mudslide was impossible in such heavy rain. “I’m just waiting for it to start snowing at this point,” he said with a grin.

Don Grandgeorge, a DWP technician, cradled a cup of coffee--supplied by Buenaventura Street residents--in his hands as a fellow employee munched on an apple fritter. Four dozen doughnuts and three decanters of hot chocolate and coffee had been set out for rain-soaked city workers, neighbors and reporters.

“Yeah, it was my day off,” Grandgeorge said as his partner, Kirk Strange, chuckled. Both men shrugged off responding to the mudslide as just part of their jobs.

Some residents blamed the slide on developers who they said created the slope about two years ago by filling a steep, narrow ravine with dirt.

The mud wedge that slipped down the slope consisted of the transplanted dirt, said Bill Wilson, a Buenaventura resident. Only a few young trees and shrubs dotted the slope.

Cornell said many residents fought the development that removed many of the ravine’s old oak trees, which anchored the soil. Residents also complained of poor drainage at the site.

Cornell conceded, however, that mudslides during the present rains are probably unavoidable. “Even if we still had the ravine, it would have been so saturated, the mud would have been sliding by now,” she said.

* MAIN STORY: A1