It is compared with the eruption of Mount St. Helen’s in 1980, the devastating mudslide that happened a week ago.
Floridas has the hurricanes. Nevada the killing heat waves. California the earth quakes. Indiana the tornados. State of Washington has the mud slides. That’s how the woman I talked to who lost her home back in 1996 at Christmas responded on my question about the danger in living on a bluff that slided.
It is raining in Washington. First the fall rains. Then the winter ones. And now the spring rains. The soil around the state is soaked with water. 18 people are confirmed dead. About 10 bodies are found but not identified. During the week the number of missing people have been 90, but today it dropped to 30. That’s bad enough. Exhausted searchers are wading in an extremely dangerous grey mess of deep clay and debris from homes, trees, cars and trailers. More rain is coming in and the wind is picking up.
It was last Saturday March 22 when the rain-soaked hillside near Oso, Arlington in Snohomish County about an hour north of Seattle slid away and demolished at least 30 homes and buried a milelong stretch of Highway 530 under 20 feet or more of mud. Wreckage is all that remains of neighborhoods along the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River. The situation is horrible.
The day after Christmas day 1996 it started snowing. Sounds nice, right, a white Christmas? The snow is usually wet and heavy in Seattle though, and as I remember it, a foot or more at that time. In the Portage Bay marina outside our living room window the roofs covering the boats collapsed and what was sheltered destroyed. The airport Seatac was closed for about 24 hours, the Metro bus system was down and there was practically no way to get from one place to another.
There were mudslides most everywhere, even in the city of Seattle. On my daily route from Downtown to Portage Bay that winter and spring I passed a couple of houses on an inclined lot with large cracks in their post modern concrete facade. I don’t know if the owners stayed in their homes or not. They felt like haunted houses. In the middle of the city.
What makes my heart still cramp though, is the house on the bluff that slided right into Puget sound. It was the home of a family who went to bed in the evening and were swallowed by the sea before dawn. The two children in the same age as Trouble & Trouble.
It rains in the state of Washington. A lot. And the geology doesn’t help. Layers of different kinds of soil on top of each other works like an avalanche when soaked with water, and the slide is a fact. There are opinions too that extensive clear cutting makes the situation worse. Also, people all over this planet want to live close to water. We are drawn to water like thirsting creatures in a desert and therefor building our homes in risky places.
This wasn’t really the case near Oso though. The neighborhood was on the opposite side of the river from the hillside that slided. Yet it wasn’t safe. And now it’s gone.
http://seattletimes.com/flatpages/local/interactivebeforeandafterthe530mudslide.html
The search team of professionals and volunteers have been working with crowbars, shovels, probes and tools from dawn until the dusk turns dark for a week now. There is clay like quick sand up to their thighs. Whenever they find human remains, they stop, mark the spot with GPS, and the remains are eventually removed using helicopters. Sometimes, when finding somebody underneath a pile of logs, they buck everything out of the way, digging it out by hand rather than by machine. The condition of some of the bodies has added to the difficulty of making identifications, the slide hit with such force that often the rescuers are not recovering full, intact victims.
Also, the entire mudslide site is believed to be contaminated with household chemicals, diesel and propane from heating tanks, mineral oil from transformers, and flammable gas tanks. The horrible situation is like a war scene.
At the eruption of Mt. St. Helen’s in 1980 57 people died. The state’s deadliest natural disaster occurred on March 1, 1910, when an avalanche swept two passenger trains down a ravine near Stevens Pass, killing 96. It will probably be weeks until we know the death rate of the Oso mudslide. The neighborhoods along the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River were only 180 people. A small community facing a great loss and unbearable difficulties, now and for many years ahead.
To state that a Facebook page would make a difference in this situation sounds silly. But I actually think it does. Snohomish County set one up 17 hours ago to help coordinate fundraising and relief efforts. There is a concert announced, a silent auction, different fundraisers and simply communication between people from near and far. 1493 people likes the page, increasing by the minute. Around eight times more than the population of the community, now sadly reduced with an unknown number.
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