Storm Damage Less Than Feared : Rain: Barriers hold back mud in Malibu. CSUN students slog through muck on quake-ravaged campus.

The rains came and the winds blew--snarling commuter traffic, setting off mudslides and unleashing a boulder that slammed into a woman’s car--but the damage from Thursday’s storm was less than had been feared.

Unlike last week, when mud from hillsides stripped bare in last fall’s devastating fires surged through homes in Malibu and buried streets in Altadena, the barriers built of sandbags, plywood, bales of straw and sheets of plastic did their job this time.

More than an inch of wind-driven rain hammered the fragile slopes above Malibu early Thursday morning, but most of the runoff was manageable. By late morning, the rain had begun to slacken, the sun was beginning to peek through and residents who had fled were returning to their homes.

The grounds of Cal State Northridge--furrowed during the earthquake and then churned to dust by heavy equipment during reconstruction work--were reduced to a muddy bog by the drenching rains that struck before daybreak. Students slogged gamely through the muck to the trailers serving as temporary classrooms.

Flooded intersections and vehicles skidding out of control on slippery pavement turned the morning commute into a tangle of stalled cars and short tempers. Police said a 23-year-old Woodland Hills man was killed when his car skidded on a curve on Topanga Canyon Road and slammed head-on into another vehicle. His identity was not immediately released.

Clogged drains backed up water 2 feet deep on La Cienega Boulevard in Baldwin Hills, and the California Highway Patrol said at 8:45 a.m. that traffic on most Los Angeles-area freeways was moving at a crawl--if at all. Rockslides closed a number of streets.

On Malibu Canyon Road, a rock the size of a stove plummeted onto the top of a small car driven by Michelle Faircloth, 21, collapsing the roof to the top of the steering wheel and fracturing her right collarbone.

Faircloth, who was pulled from the wreckage by a friend who happened to be driving by, was treated at Westlake Hospital and released. She said she was on her way to work at Pepperdine University about 7:30 a.m. when the accident occurred.

Heavy snow fell in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains above 6,000 feet on Thursday, to the delight of skiers and the dismay of Caltrans crews attempting to keep mountain roads open. Officials said about a foot of new snow accumulated at higher elevations.

In Malibu, where Pacific Coast Highway was blocked and 25 homes below the charred hillsides were invaded by mud last week, residents were better prepared Thursday, their houses protected with sturdy, makeshift barriers that diverted the cascading muck into runoff channels.

Caltrans crews used skip-loaders to scoop water and mud from a pond that grew but never overflowed above PCH at the base of Big Rock Drive.

Some of the homeowners stood watch during the morning for the torrent that never came.

Barry McManus, wearing a plastic trash bag for a raincoat, waited in front of his four-unit apartment building damaged by mud Feb. 7.

“We’ll stop it this time,” McManus said. “We’re doing more sandbagging and we’re going to keep the flow moving with a fire hose.”

A couple of houses away, Randy Brant, 42, explained that he had left the doors on his garage open this time so that any mud seeping in one end could seep out the other.

“If I’d done that last time, everything would have been OK,” said Brant, who lost a car, a washing machine and most of a set of golf clubs during last week’s storm.

Last week, Brant drove a golf ball down PCH with a salvaged club while waiting for Caltrans to reopen the road.

“The best thing then was that my friends back east saw me tee off on TV and hit a car with a golf ball,” Brant said.

Other residents decided to play it safe on Thursday, leaving their homes as soon as the storm struck.

“After the fire, the earthquake, then this, I finally considered leaving for a while,” said Linda Derussy as she loaded her dog, Sam, into a friend’s Land Rover. She said she would be back as soon as the skies cleared.

Kent Knudsen, armed with a broom, watched and waited in front of the house on PCH that he had barricaded with a wall of sandbags three feet high.

“We got hit pretty hard last time,” Knudsen said before ducking out of sight to avoid a television cameraman heading his way. “I’m tired of being filmed in pestilence,” said Knudsen, who was shown being carried to safety on a skip-loader during last week’s floods.

By 10 a.m. the rain tapered off and the sun began peeking through the clouds. The streams of water that had been pouring down hillsides and canyons slowed to a trickle, then stopped.

At Cal State Northridge, the combination of heavy rain and a patchwork of temporary and outdoor classrooms proved chaotic, yet manageable.

“Everybody is trying to be patient,” said senior Janet Toma, 22, as she waited inside to find out if a sociology class that had been meeting outside would be canceled.

Across the campus, the dirt around the trailers had become giant pools of mud, which proved too much for a few.

“How am I supposed to get to class?” asked senior Dolores Evans, 27, surveying the mire that separated her from her engineering class.

“I’m not walking in that . . . not with my new rain boots on anyway,” she said. “It’s time for me to go home.”

But most of the students decided to make the best of it.

“After an earthquake destroys literally your campus, who cares about a few inches of rain and a little mud?” said Michael Lee, a 19-year-old freshman.

As they did last week, the fire-ravaged hillsides of Laguna Beach escaped serious mudslides, despite 0.87 of an inch of rain that flooded Laguna Canyon Road briefly and caused a short flash flood on Canyon Acres Drive.

In Costa Mesa, a burst of wind about 10:30 a.m. peeled off the roof of a four-bedroom bluff-top home. The Newport Beach Fire Department arrived about five minutes later and nailed plastic over the home to protect the interior from the rain.

Forecasters said the forecast today called for partly cloudy skies with a chance of showers through tonight and a renewed chance of showers late Sunday and early Monday.

By 5 p.m. Thursday, 0.77 of an inch of rain had fallen at the Los Angeles Civic Center, raising the season’s total there to 4.14 inches, less than half the normal total for Feb. 17 of 9.71 inches. The rainfall season is measured from July 1 through June 30.

Times staff writer John Chandler contributed to this story.