After Mountain’s Collapse, Uncertainty and Loss

U.S.

By KIRK JOHNSONMARCH 26, 2014

A rescue worker walked through mud from the giant landslide near Oso, Wash., on Wednesday as efforts to find victims continued. The community was braced for the toll to climb.

The removal of debris was slow going, even for heavy machinery. Searchers wearing hard hats and raincoats walked across a terrain of heaving mud hummocks, some 15 feet high, that some compared with the devastation left by the 1980 volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens. Pool photo by Rick Wilking 

ARLINGTON, Wash. — Pam Sanford was waiting for news about her brother, Joseph Miller, among the missing since Saturday in the Oso landslide, when a police detective called asking for his dental records.

Had he been found? The detective would not say.

And so she waited some more — along with scores of other relatives and friends of the people missing in what is turning into one of the worst landslides in the nation’s history. They wait for the telephone call. Or for the possessions found by volunteers. Or just to know the scale of this catastrophe — whether the final death toll will be closer to the 16 bodies recovered by Wednesday evening, or will grow closer to the more than 100 people who are listed as missing or whose status is uncertain. 

Some of what is known about the sudden, catastrophic collapse of the mountainside above the tiny community of Oso just before 11 a.m. on Saturday is quantifiable: the volume of earth, at 15 million cubic yards; the number of homes in the slide’s path, 49 (with 35 believed to be occupied full time). The high-tech tools of the 200-plus responders at the one-square-mile debris field, about 50 miles northeast of Seattle, are based on science. 

Extent of the Mudslide

A devastating mudslide wiped out a swath of homes in this area, east of Oso, Wash. The aerial image below, from June 2012, provides a view of what the area looked like before Saturday’s collapse.

Aerial image by Pictometry International

But gnawing uncertainty remains the order of the day — particularly for families wondering whether, or even if, a loved one’s remains will ever be found in such a vast and contorted field of earth equivalent to three million dump truck loads.

Beyond the 16 bodies recovered, at least eight more were located but not removed. Emergency officials said the 176 reports of people unaccounted for has been culled by a team at the Snohomish County sheriff’s office to a firmer number of 90 people considered missing and 35 more whose status is undetermined.

But because the disaster happened on a Saturday morning — perhaps the worst possible moment, with so many people sleeping in, or at least not going to work or school — the variables of who was where when or who did not come home have created their own nightmare of uncertainty.

Snohomish County officials said Wednesday that they were still treating the disaster as a potential rescue mission, but that hopes for a miracle of survival were fading. Among the rescue vehicles on Wednesday were several ambulances, not for victims, but to aid rescue personnel injured on the pile.

Black Hawk helicopters from the National Guard flew overhead and were being used to remove bodies. Searchers wearing hard hats and raincoats walked across a terrain of heaving mud hummocks, some 15 feet high, that some responders have compared to the devastation left by the 1980 volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens.

In the close-knit logging community of Darrington, just east of where the slide occurred, residents — many of them skilled loggers familiar with the landscape — had volunteered to help rescue teams or ventured into the slide area on their own in search of missing friends or relatives. Frustration and anger simmered about officials’ turning volunteers away.

“They need to let these local people take care of their own,” said Dan Allen, 53, a former logger, beginning to cry. “Even though it’s real traumatic, that’s part of the healing process. We appreciate the help, but please don’t try to elbow us out of the way.” 

At the debris field itself, responders said that for all the high-tech tools or big machinery being brought to bear — from cameras to listening devices to backhoes — the most effective path so far in finding victims had been dogs trained in rescue and recovery, and people with muscles and shovels.

From a hillside south of the river, searchers could be seen walking on planks across mud mounds to reach wrecked houses. At street level, workers hosed themselves off after shifts. At the gouged hill where the slide occurred, white markers have been set at the top of the raw cliff, so scientists can fly overhead and measure for any hint the ground will shift again.

 

The Science of Mudslides

They begin in an instant, often without warning. Many factors can contribute to mudslides, including erosion, fire and heavy rain. The aftermath can be devastating.

“People are under logs, mixed in,” said Steve Mason, a fire battalion chief who is leading one of the rescue operations. “It’s a slow process.”

Kim Green, 59, a retired logger, was waiting for word in a bar here in Arlington, about 20 miles from the landslide, nursing a vodka and orange juice.

“He’s in the slide somewhere,” Mr. Green said, talking about his 14-year-old cousin, missing since Saturday. “I was talking to his dad, who said, ‘I don’t have much hope, because there’s not much yelling from the debris field.’ ”

Many people touched by the catastrophe say they want answers about what happened before the mountain’s horrific crash. Though the hill above Oso has been the site of several significant landslides in recent decades, new construction and logging were allowed.

In interviews on Wednesday, two Darrington volunteer firefighters, who have been out to the scene repeatedly since Saturday, described a barren landscape, stripped of all trees and structures. “The south portion is where a lot of the debris is, from where the wave of mud came downhill,” said Eric Finzimer, one of the firefighters. “The rest is a moonscape of just mud, clay and river sand.”

The beauty and the good fishing and the mountain above it all, prone to slide, were the nature of the place, people familiar with the area said.

“There was always stuff coming down,” said Ms. Sanford, whose father, Reed Miller, 75, had lived in Oso, near the river, since 1991. She said that in recent months her brother Joseph, 47, who is disabled and has battled mental illness for much of his life, had joined their father.

Emergency management officials adamantly said Wednesday that the dangers in the Stillaguamish River valley had been a secret to no one.

“People knew that this was a landslide-prone area,” said John Pennington, the Snohomish County director of emergency management, referring to residents. He said that the millions of dollars spent to reinforce the riverbank area and the mountainside after a 2006 slide did make the area safer, and made people feel safer as well.

“Sometimes landslides that are this catastrophic just happen,” Mr. Pennington said.

Ms. Sanford, for one, agreed that things had felt safer in recent years. After the 2006 slide, she said, the government’s work in reinforcing the mountain seemed to work — or at least to stop the regular tiny landslides that had previously been so common in Oso. The noises that the mountain so regularly made, sloughing off small slides, became quiet. “We stopped even talking about it,” she said.

Saturday’s landslide was different. According to a 1999 paper on the county’s geology, slope failures in the United States kill about 25 people a year, a number that has almost been nearly matched in the Oso slide.

Nicholas Pinter, a professor of geology at Southern Illinois University, said that in purely geological terms, this landslide was not especially large. He said he had seen many of similar scale out in the wilderness “that no one saw or cared about.”

This one, however, was especially destructive in terms of lives lost and property damaged.

“Events like this are natural processes and only become tragedies when people find themselves in the way,” he said.

Some families are already resigned to a wait that goes on forever.

“She’ll probably never be found,” said Edith Owens of Ocala, Fla., who has been waiting for word about her nephew’s wife, Brandy Ward, spending mornings on the Internet looking for news.

Ms. Sanford said she had thought of going to the site to search for her brother, but ultimately decided that her parents had lost too much already.

“I’m the last surviving sibling; my sister died as an infant, and now my brother is presumed dead,” she said. “I don’t want to leave my parents with no children.”

Reporting was contributed by Ian Lovett from Darrington, Wash.; Alan Blinder from Atlanta; and Timothy Williams, Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Alain Delaquérière and John Schwartz from New York.