Mark Herrick, right, and Gary Scott, volunteers with a church group, remove mud Sunday from a Los Angeles home following a slide. Weekend rain forced hundreds of homes to be evacuated.

LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE, Calif. — Homeowners shoveled mud from living rooms and workers scooped debris from catch basins in a foothill neighborhood slammed by weekend rains as yet another storm takes aim at the region.

Evacuated residents were allowed back into the mud-caked La Canada Flintridge area north of Los Angeles Sunday, where a day earlier 43 homes were damaged by rain-spawned mudslides. Nine of them were so badly damaged they've been deemed uninhabitable.

More than 500 homes were evacuated as mud and debris — surging down from foothills denuded of undercover by autumn wildfires — overflowed basins and flooded streets.

The power of the weekend storm surprised many.

"In my 20 years of fire service, this is the first time I've seen this much devastation caused by a weather system," Los Angeles County Fire Battalion Chief Mike Brown said as he walked past ravaged suburban homes.

With another storm expected Tuesday, work crews would try to clear the debris basins as much as they could, but significant clearing could take weeks.

"We're working around the clock to provide whatever capacity we can," Department of Public Works spokesman Bob Spencer told the Pasadena Star-News.

Crews used 300 dump trucks along with bulldozers and other earth-moving machinery.

Tons of boulders that clogged a basin inlet and helped spur Saturday's overflow have been removed, Spencer said.

The still-soupy mud in the basins was incredibly difficult to remove the day after a storm, he said.

The mayor of La Canada Flintridge, Laura Olhasso, said Sunday the U.S. Forest Service should pay to help remove the mud and debris that came down the mountains from federal land burned by the fires.

"The federal government is not taking responsibility for the flow of mud that came from its property," Olhasso said. "They say there's nothing they can do to keep it from flowing, then they need to help clean it up. They need to be responsible property owners."

Olhasso said the city has received "no assurances" of help from federal authorities.

"This is potentially a threat for the next three to five years, which is how long they say it could be before the vegetation grows back," she said.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger toured the area Sunday. He said the three county sites set aside for mud disposal might not be enough.