Slogging through sometimes waist-deep mud, rescuers returned to the
"unreal" scene of a deadly Cascade Mountain landslide Thursday with the
grim expectation that more bodies waited underneath them.
Later that day, medical examiners added one more death to the official toll, bringing it to 17.
Saturday's collapse
dragged several homes downhill with it, scattering their contents among
hundreds of acres of earth and smashed trees.
"Anything that anyone
would have in a neighborhood is now strewn out here," said Steve Mason, a
Snohomish County fire battalion chief. "... Some (houses) look like
they've been put in a blender and dropped on the ground, so you have
basically a big pile of debris."
The landslide near Oso, about 60 miles northeast of Seattle, has turned many lives upside down and cost far too many as well.
District Chief Travis Hots said that at least seven more bodies that have been found won't be added to the count until medical examiners can identify them.
"That number is going to likely change very, very much (Friday) morning," Hots said.
About 90 remained
unaccounted for Thursday as rescuers dug into the ground with chainsaws,
pumps and their hands in hopes of finding survivors -- or least
bringing solace to family members by finding remains. That figure was
the same as it was on Wednesday, though it, too, could change.
"Sometimes it takes
several hours to get somebody out of an area," Hots said. When a body is
extracted, "You can almost hear a pin drop out there. You see seasoned
veterans in this business, they start to tear up. Their eyes get
glossy."
No survivors have been
found for days, but this still isn't a recovery operation. Rescuers are
using small excavators, shovels and their hands -- not heavy machinery
-- in areas where a survivor could be.
"As far as I'm
concerned, we're still in rescue mode," Hots said Thursday evening. "I
haven't lost hope yet ... That chance is very slim, but we haven't given
up yet."
While some families
cling to that hope, others -- like Rae Smith, whose daughter Summer
Raffo was driving through the area when the slide hit -- are in
mourning.
"My heart is broken. It's broken," Rae Smith said.
Pointing out homes on a map, volunteer rescuer Peter Selvig noted the seemingly random nature of the fatalities.
"This guy lived and his wife died ... we were on the school board together for about 30 years," Selvig said.
More rain made the mud worse Thursday, slowing the search, rescuers reported.
Senior Airman Charlotte
Gibson -- part of an Air National Guard squadron assisting the search --
said rescuers "fall in about waist-deep in some areas," knee-deep in
others.
"Just walking through it, it's almost impossible," Gibson said.
And as bad as the
conditions are, the scale of the devastation is worse. Master Sgt. Chris
Martin told reporters, "I don't think anything could prepare you for
what you see out there."
Workers worked Thursday
to build an east-west emergency road to reconnect both sides of the
landslide, along with pathways of plywood and logs to make it easier to
get people and equipment into the search zone. Washington State Patrol
spokesman Bob Calkins said those crews and those looking for victims had
a productive day Thursday.
"The rescuers and the
road-builders seem to be hitting their stride now," said Calkins. "We're
several days into this, they are starting to get a rhythm."
That doesn't mean
they're close to done, or that the job is easy. Mason noted that the mud
also holds the remains of septic systems, requiring searchers to wash
thoroughly at the end of their shifts. And the collapse cut off the
Stillaguamish River, causing the water to back up into what's now a
small lake, he said.
"You have homes on this side that are now islands," he said. On another side, "Cars are under water."
The area affected in the most recent calamity has been hit before, in 1951, 1967, 1988 and 2006. Daniel Miller, a geomorphologist who co-wrote a report in 1999
for the Army Corps of Engineers that looked at options to reduce
sediments from area landslides, said that none of these events resulted
in deaths, though at least the most recent one damaged houses.
This history,
along with erosion from Stillaguamish River and worries about
overlogging, prompted some mitigation and other efforts. A 2010
plan identified the area swept away as one of several "hot spots," John
Pennington, Snohomish County's emergency management director, told
reporters Wednesday.
The county had been
saturated by "amazing" rains for weeks on end that made the ground even
less stable, Pennington added. Then there was a small, recent earthquake
that may or may not have shaken things up more.
But he said no one
anticipated an event of the scale of what happened Saturday morning:
"Sometimes, big events just happen." And he said residents knew the area
was "landslide-prone" -- an assertion one of them challenged.
"Nobody ever told us
that there were geology reports," Robin Youngblood told CNN's Anderson
Cooper. "... This is criminal, as far as I'm concerned."
Determining whether the
human toll from this disaster could have been abated is a key question,
but one best answered another day, Gov. Jay Inslee has said. For now,
the focus is on the ground -- and in the air -- scouring through the
rubble.
And once again, Mother
Nature is making things complicated. While Snohomish County reported
late Thursday afternoon that water levels on one side of the slide had
fallen two feet -- a "big help for rescuers," the county tweeted -- there's the reality of yet more rain and all the perils and complications that brings.
The
National Weather Service's forecast
calls for more rain Friday and beyond; in fact, there's a chance if not
an all but guarantee of showers for the next full week, at least.
For that reason,
rescuers are keeping an eye on the weather even as they sift through
silt, wood and rubble, according to Snohomish County Public Works
Director Steve Thompson.
"Right now there's no risk of further slides, but we're watching the rain," Thompson said.
