THE CALIFORNIA DELUGE : Islands in the Flood : Laguna Beach: Once-Charming Rustic Hillsides Feed a Growing Fear

They are known as some of the toniest stops on a sort of Southern California Riviera. Laguna Beach, Malibu and Santa Barbara are separated by 200 miles of coastline, but they are united by their images as sunny playgrounds.

Malibu has its movie celebrities. Laguna Beach has its artists colony. And Santa Barbara has an understated combination of the two. And all three cities have shared a propensity in recent years for brush fires.

As most of Southern California bailed out of torrential rains, the glamorous trio of beach resorts had something else in common Wednesday--flooded streets and highways had left them essentially isolated from the outside world.

Ordinarily, Ron Paradis answers the phone at Johnny Rockets, his downtown hamburger joint, by saying, “It’s a great day at the beach!” But lately, his manner is different.

“We’re lucky no one’s been killed” in Laguna, he said with a snarl Wednesday. “We’re aggravated, frustrated, depressed. . . . We expect another storm, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

Six inches of rain in a two-hour period left his customers standing thigh-deep in water a week ago. The 10 diners held hostage by the storm escaped only by fleeing out a back door and climbing through a window of the nearby Marine Room bar.

On Wednesday, the day after the latest inundation of rain and mud, the Marine Room was in equally sad shape.

“We’re not going to call it the Marine Room anymore,” said owner Kelly Boyd. “We’re going to call it the Submarine Room.”

Life here in recent days has been one of commutes that take as long as five hours on the clogged routes connecting Laguna with the outside world; telephone service that goes dead when the rainfall gets heavy; schoolchildren evacuated without notice, then left standing ankle-deep in water when the buses quit running; and an ever-growing fear about the rustic hillsides that give the city much of its quaint charm.

“Everyone wonders when all of that mud will come down,” Paradis said. In some neighborhoods, the mud’s slow descent had picked up speed Wednesday.

Memories of the latest storm were painfully fresh as cleanup efforts began.

As three-foot-high waters sped down Laguna Canyon, Lisa Rasberry said she forgot about the pot roast she had been cooking for her boyfriend, John Phillips, 35, and son, Donnie, 6.

Her thoughts were on how she and Donnie could escape without getting hurt. The two were marooned. And from the kitchen window, the waters appeared to be rising.

Phillips was outside trying to protect his property, his nearly restored 1942 Ford “Woody” and his wood shop.

“I thought we were going to get wiped out,” recalled Rasberry, 32. “The first thing I said was: ‘Where’s Donnie’s life jacket?’ It was in the boat, but that was in front of the house.”

“It was radical,” Phillips said. “It was raging.”

Residents of this tony beach enclave cherish their isolation from the rest of the world. But as many said Wednesday, not this much isolation.

Even under normal conditions, Laguna residents have only two ways to leave town--on Laguna Canyon Road or along Pacific Coast Highway. But both routes have been cut off by waves of mud that rushed down the canyon, flooded the downtown and wrecked its popular Main Beach.

“We are just the entertainment capital of the world,” Liz Reese, a 50-year-old hairdresser, said Wednesday. “But we’d like to give that title up.”