Malibu’s Mantra: Sandbag, Sandbag, Sandbag : Environment: Beleaguered residents scramble to shore up homes against possible Sunday storm.

As Malibu residents dug out of mud-filled homes, forecasts for a weekend storm sent residents beleaguered by Monday’s cascade scrambling to shore up homes against more mudslides.

Sandbag, sandbag, sandbag--it’s been the city’s mantra since the November wildfires stripped vegetation from hillsides, leaving property vulnerable to mudslides.

“We’re talking to people who are frantic about the Sunday storm,” said Sarah Maurice, spokeswoman for the city of Malibu. “They are saying, ‘Can’t you stop it--the storm and the mudflows?’ It’s gonna happen. We’ve been telling them to prepare.”

Maurice, who was nicknamed “bag lady” for her work directing sandbagging, said free sandbags from the city’s supply of 15,000 are available at Malibu fire stations. Engineers from the Los Angeles County Flood Control District are being sent to instruct residents on proper placement.

The sandbags, however, are not foolproof. Soggy barriers at numerous houses along Pacific Coast Highway were overwhelmed by the mudflows.

With volunteers tapped out from the fires and the Jan. 17 earthquake, Malibu’s Community Disaster Recovery and Preparedness Center was operating with a dearth of assistance.

That, in part, prompted the city to dispatch temporary laborers to residences for help digging out. By Wednesday most of the houses along Pacific Coast Highway that had been socked in by mud were cleaned up and fortified with sandbags.

But not all Malibu residents heeded the city’s words to the wise.

The house of Stella Bacich, a 20-year oceanfront resident, looked conspicuously unprotected.

“What stops (the mud)?” asked Bacich, who views sandbags as a kind of false hope. “It’s all Mother Nature. You can’t do anything about it.

Public Works Director John Clement said city employees and others are working around the clock to clear huge accumulations of sediment, rocks and dead vegetation from the system of storm drains, culverts, dams and racks erected to catch debris. The system stopped much of the debris but was overwhelmed by the enormity of the flow, which pummeled at least 24 houses on Pacific Coast Highway and severely damaged one home in lower Las Flores Canyon.

“We don’t know how much more mud could come down again,” said Clement. “You still look up in the hillsides at Tuna Canyon and Big Rock and there is a lot of black soil. So it is hard to determine how much more hydrophobic soil is still there.”

Hydrophobic soil is a non-porous layer two to six inches below the surface that is produced from gases and oils of burned chaparral. When it rains, water runs off the surface instead of being absorbed, creating mudslides and debris flows.

“We had a little more than an inch of rain (Monday), so if it comes down like it did, then we are going to have mudslides again,” Clement said.

Tired but unbowed, city officials say they are ready. City Manager David Carmany said long-term plans for stopping the slides and preventing fires are being discussed. A study on fire-ravaged Las Flores Canyon is under way, along with an attempt to get funding to safeguard fire- and flood-prone areas through special disaster recovery legislation that Assemblyman Terry B. Friedman (D-Brentwood) plans to sponsor.

Malibu is also studying geographically similar communities for answers to problems with its storm drains and water system, which failed during the wildfires.

“I’d like to think we can do something to preempt (mudslides),” Carmany said. “We don’t know what kind of long-term solutions are out there yet.”

If the mudslides continue on a grand scale, Carmany said the city would ask for assistance from the Navy’s 91st U.S. Construction Battalion, known as Seabees. The Seabees, akin to the Army Corps of Engineers, in just two days rebuilt a burned bridge over Las Flores Creek after the fires, Carmany said.

Meanwhile, life in Malibu took on some signs of normalcy Wednesday. Spandex-clad women jogged past mud-splattered residents still cleaning up. Cosentino’s Nursery, fully recovered from the mud that filled it at the bottom of Las Flores Canyon on Pacific Coast Highway, was open and getting ready for its biggest day of the year: Valentine’s Day.