Fillmore Residents Tap Into Reliable Reservoir of Aid : Disaster: Inhabitants of tight-knit city turn to themselves to help neighbors fight their way through more adversity.

First an earthquake. Then a flood. And, once again, Fillmore finds itself one of the hardest-hit cities in the wake of a natural disaster.

But like last year, residents of this tiny, low-income city are helping themselves and one another where government aid and outside help are sometimes slow to arrive.

Residents--still recovering from last year’s earthquake--now must contend with tons of mud and water seeping into their homes and covering their streets.

A week of almost constant rain--capped by the storm Tuesday--liquefied the hills north of the city and sent mud sliding into town.

Residents on the north side of the city Wednesday coped as best they could with the knee-deep gunk, which turned their asphalt streets into impassable mud roads.

“I have never, ever seen so much mud in Fillmore,” said 77-year-old Burt Davis as he shoveled mud from the front of his home on Mountain View Street.

But Davis, a lifelong resident of Fillmore, said the latest disaster is nothing new for a city used to adversity.

“I’ll take the water and mud over an earthquake any day,” he said.

Around the corner on 4th Street, neighbors helped one another dig out and fill sandbags in preparation of more rain.

“That’s what you’re supposed to do,” said 38-year-old Russell Butler, another lifetime resident. “We have a camaraderie during times like these.”

Butler, a general contractor, called 11 of his employees to his 4th Street home during and after the storm to help about a dozen neighbors gird their homes against the oozing hill behind the street.

Fillmore residents said they learned to be resilient in the aftermath of the earthquake when the need overwhelmed the available government assistance. And this time around, outside help may not be as available as it was last year.

“We got help from other communities after the earthquake,” City Clerk Noreen Withers said. “But this time, they have their own problems. We’re on our own.”

For a while Tuesday, Fillmore was not only on its own, but alone and isolated from the rest of the county. All roads leading in and out of Fillmore were closed throughout the day, stranding truckers and travelers alike while hampering the rescue effort.

“We ran out of sandbags,” City Councilman Roger Campbell said. “We had to use Baggies.”

Once again, Campbell took off his auto mechanics smock and replaced his councilman hat with an assistant fire chief’s helmet and coordinated the city’s rescue effort Tuesday.

“I think we were lucky,” he said. Campbell added that he now compares natural disasters to the Northridge earthquake. “Everything pales after you’ve been through an earthquake.”

Preliminary estimates show about $200,000 in damage to city property while the private property survey has yet to be completed, officials said.

The final tally could exceed $1 million, far less than the earthquake damage, but still a big burden for the city. The storm prompted the City Council to declare a local state of emergency Tuesday night.