Elderly residents were evacuated from a mobile home park, farmers called for help to dig out of the mud, valuable agricultural land flooded, major roads closed and school officials decided to shut down local school campuses today as Fillmore on Sunday absorbed one of the biggest floods in years.

Shortly after 11 a.m., fire and sheriff's officials began evacuating the El Dorado mobile home park, where close to 500 people live by fast-running Pole Creek.

Then again at 4 p.m. firefighters went back to roust those who still insisted on staying.

Helen Rosette, manager of the park, said some residents would sleep overnight on cots at the Fillmore Veterans Building downtown, where the Red Cross had set up an evacuation center. She said those who needed sturdier beds may be staying at Orange Blossom Villa, an assisted-living center in Fillmore.

By nightfall, she said, no one was left in the park.

Dozens of residents walked slowly into the evacuation center, where they ate cinnamon rolls and drank coffee under the leaking roof.

Retirees James and Sandra Miles grabbed extra clothes, a box of files, cash, a cell phone, medications and the hard drive to his computer on the way out.

"I'm scared," Sandra Miles said. "I've never been in an evacuation in my life."

Miles said she took the less important papers, forgetting insurance documents in the rush.

"Medicine was the first thing because we both take medicine," she said.

Flood-control workers had cut down a berm on the west side of the creek to direct waters away from the park earlier in the day. The park had not flooded by evening after workers bailed water out of the channel, said Jeff Pratt, director of the county Watershed Protection District.

"We had been out there bailing and bailing and bailing," Pratt said.

Five feet of sediment coming down from areas burned in the October wildfires had piled up in the creek channel, causing water to lap over the top, Pratt said.

"The channel is about eight feet high. Four or five of that is sediment," he said.

Sheriff's deputies would be monitoring a spot along Goodenough Road overnight where no levee was in place along Sespe Creek, Pratt said.

During the day, floodwaters washed over an equestrian center located south of the Santa Clara River, across Highway 23 and on a farm owned by the Fillmore Unified School District.

Kay Mitchell, who lived in a trailer on the grounds of the equestrian center, feared she would lose her home.

"It's just a mess," she said. "It's like an island."

Flood-control authorities said it appeared that waters from the river and a channel coming from Grimes Canyon had caused the flooding in that area.

Classes in public schools in Fillmore and Piru will be closed today, said Mario Contini, superintendent of Fillmore Unified School District.

The evacuations and road closures prompted the decision to shut down the district of 4,000 students for what Contini hoped will be just one day.

During the day, neighbors helped one another deal with the storm that dumped seven inches of rain over the past three days.

John Lockhart, who lives on Goodenough Road, said his farmhand's truck got mired in the mud so badly that the mud was coming up over the doors. A friend, Mike Richardson, came over with a bulldozer to pull the vehicle out.

Lockhart is in a precarious spot on the north side of a mudslide blocking the way into town and next to the Sespe, but he was not panicked.

"The only thing that could go really bad was if there was a huge slide into the Sespe and the Sespe would come around on us, and I don't think that will happen," he said.

Bert Rapp, Fillmore city engineer, said officials would have to wait for the floodwaters to recede before they could assess damage at the stables and the school district's farm.

"We're going to have to see what's left," he said.