Residents Outmatched by Relentless Flooding : Weather: Backhoes and tractors prove unable to protect homes, as rising rivers close Sierra Highway, wash out driveways and isolate homes.

When the riverbeds along Sierra Highway became churning rapids early Friday, north county residents turned to their tractors and whatever else was handy in a futile attempt to protect themselves from an unrelenting onslaught of muddy water and watery mud.

And they braced themselves and their homes for even worse--another pounding that was expected to come Friday night and this morning.

But in what some residents said was the worst local flooding in decades, even the big backhoes they used to shore up their homes were no match for Mother Nature. Like the cars and trucks, the machines got stranded in as much as 5 feet of muck.

Some residents were stuck at home, others away from home, when authorities closed a 12-mile stretch of the highway, which is a main artery through the rural northern section of the county. Some were told to just hang in there and wait out the storms and the floods, even if the weather lasts into next week.

“It’s all a wasteland up here,” said Grant Moore, an Agua Dulce resident who has been holed up at his home on North Rocking Horse Road since Thursday evening because of flooding on the two-lane highway at the bottom of his street. “We can’t get out. Our road is so deep, the front of our tractor disappeared when we tried to use it.”

Nearby, hours before the winding stretch of highway blacktop became off-limits to all but a few residents and emergency vehicles, John Hintzen saw that the worst was yet to come. So he and some neighbors decided not to try to drive up their narrow Mint Canyon Road to the safety of home.

“We parked our cars on the highway,” he said Friday afternoon, “and waded in.”

Outside Hintzen’s home, the swollen currents running through his back yard were knocking down telephone poles and trees, swamping trailers in the nearby Oak Grove Trailer Park and pushing waves of mud into some places, including the koi pond at upscale Le Chene restaurant in Saugus. There, owner Juan Alonso said he had too many other concerns, such as potential indoor flooding and lack of customers, to worry about his stock of the expensive fish.

“Besides,” he said with a sigh, “they’re probably in Ventura by now. It’s all water between here and there. Pretty soon, I’ll have salmon coming through here.”

Most of the damage occurred along Sierra Highway from Saugus to Agua Dulce, particularly in the Mint Canyon, Sierra Vallejo Canyon and Vasquez Canyon areas, authorities said. They closed the highway, which runs west of and roughly parallel to the Antelope Valley Freeway, from Vasquez Canyon Road to Agua Dulce Canyon.

“It’s messed up all over there,” Sheriff’s Deputy Ed Grantham said. “The narrow canyon gets flooded because the creek is right next to it.” Authorities said there were many other minor road closures, and thousands of residents reported power and cable television outages that lasted for hours.

“I can’t even watch television,” Hintzen said. “I grew up here, and we’ve never seen it this bad.”

In many areas, cars and trucks were submerged and swept away as water overflowed the banks of the nearby Santa Clara River. Knee-deep muck pushed against the foundations of homes and oozed into hallways and basements.

“I’ve got a raging river going through here,” Patricia Allen said of her Arabian horse farm and ranch.

Near the intersection of Sierra Highway and Steele Road, rescuers pulled area resident Louis Reinoso from under a backhoe about 10 a.m. It had overturned on the slick ground as he built an earthen barrier to protect nearby homes. Reinoso was airlifted to Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital in Valencia and treated for minor injuries.

Earlier, three Canyon Country men were rescued after their truck mired in a flooded area north of Canyon Country. The men, Richard Haley, 47; Tim Rymer, 21, and Steve Rymer, 23, climbed onto their truck to await help from a swift-water rescue team, which used ropes to pull them to safety about 2 a.m. Friday.

Authorities reported no serious injuries. But there was much damage. Just west of Vasquez Rocks, torrents crashing through a wash cracked open a narrow bridge and created a chasm of more than a car length. Toppled telephone poles and trees were a common sight.

Just north of Sand Canyon Road in Canyon Country, white wooden corrals stood empty and water washed away driveways, cutting off homes from the road. Saul Holguin’s copper sedan sat on the side of the road, as the river that washed it 30 yards down the street continued to flow around it and under it.

“I was sitting at home when all of a sudden I saw the car floating away,” said Holguin, who rescued his wife’s purse from the trunk. A smooth layer of tan mud coated the car’s interior, almost matching the color of the dashboard.

“It’s part of living here. What can you do?” Holguin said. “I guess it could be worse. At least everyone’s alive.”

About half a mile farther north, Rafael Portuguese watched the rush of cafe au lait water and seemed resigned to losing his house to the unrelenting rains.

“Everything I own is in there,” Portuguese said, pointing to a small, square house about 200 yards away. “I’m not sure that it will be there tomorrow.”

Many roads were closed on the east side of the Antelope Valley, and the community of Lake Los Angeles was almost entirely cut off, authorities said.

“You can’t get there from here,” Deputy Grantham said. “Or at least if you do, you’ve got to go out of your way.”

To the south, the rising water spread over a vast area, threatening some homes with flooding.

But Ground Zero appeared to be near Sierra Highway at Mint Canyon, where the floodwaters starting coming before dawn. The 10-foot-wide swath quickly became 10 times that wide in places, swamping dirt roads, submerging back yards and knocking down trees and fences and carrying them downstream, residents said.

Donna Guyovich, a Los Angeles County Department of Public Works spokeswoman, said 8,000 cars a day travel through the stretch of Sierra Highway that was closed. She said the county was trying to reopen at least one lane by early Saturday, but that it would be at least two days until the thoroughfare was fully opened. Meanwhile, she said, “there are at least 20 or 30 homes that are completely locked in.”

Don Royce, a former county public works civil engineer, spent the day driving around in his truck looking at road conditions, especially near where the overflowing Mint Creek gnawed away at huge chunks of the highway.

“I think it’s worse now than it’s ever been,” said Royce, 55, of Canyon Country. “It could take several months before this road is passable again.”

Royce said the water was careening through riverbeds at 35 to 40 m.p.h. Danny Clark, a resident and expert river-rapids runner, agreed.

“If you had a kayak, it’d be fun,” he said, nursing a beer at Le Chene. “I’ve done a lot of white-water rafting, and I’ve never seen water move this fast.”

Joanne Swanson, a member of the Agua Dulce Town Council, also spent much of the day surveying. She said she was troubled by what she saw.

“The road has been torn up in a multitude of places,” Swanson said. “Life won’t be back to normal here for a long time.”

Times staff writer Jim Herron Zamora contributed to this story.