SEARCH DOGS TAKE BREAK
Families coping with the loss of friends and neighbors sought comfort Sunday in church services, while crews searched for more victims of the mudslide that buried the mountainside community of Oso more than a week ago.
Many of the dogs that have been essential in the search will take a two-day break, rescue crews said. Days of working in the cold and rain have taken their toll on the animals, and officials say the dogs can lose their sensing ability if overworked.
“The conditions on the slide field are difficult, so this is just a time to take care of the dogs,” said Kris Rietmann, a spokeswoman for the team working on the eastern portion of the slide.
Dogs from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that arrived more recently will continue working, said Heidi Amrine, another spokeswoman for the operation.
Late Saturday, authorities revised the number of people believed to be missing from 90 to 30, while the official death toll increased by one, to 18, said Jason Biermann, program manager at the Snohomish County Department of Emergency Management.
— Associated Press
People living in the path of a deadly Washington state landslide had virtually no warning before a wall of mud, trees and other debris thundered down the mountain. Some of the homeowners didn’t even know the hillside could give way at any time.
Unlike the warning systems and elaborate maps that help residents and officials prepare for natural disasters such as floods and hurricanes, there’s no national system to monitor slide activity and no effort underway to produce detailed nationwide landslide hazard maps.
The U.S. Geological Survey doesn’t track or inventory slide areas on a national scale, despite an ambitious plan to do so more than a decade ago when Congress directed it to come up with a national strategy to reduce landslide losses.
That’s left states and communities to put together a patchwork of maps showing landslide hazards. In some cases, they are discovering that more buildings than previously thought are sitting on unstable ground. Even then, that information may not make its way to property owners.
Building a nationwide system is now possible with new technology, experts say, but would require spending tens of millions of dollars annually and could take more than a decade to complete with the help of states and cities. So far, however, there has been little public outcry for faster, concerted action.
“No one has pushed it, and it hasn’t been a priority,” said Scott Burns, a geology professor at Portland State University. “It’s costly to monitor it, and we don’t want to pay for it.”
He added, “Now they’re seeing these large disasters and saying this is important.”
The challenge, experts say, is that many landslides are inactive or cause consistent low-level damage, while big, destructive landslides happen only sporadically and don’t cause the type of spectacular devastation hurricanes, earthquakes or tornadoes do — so they often don’t get the same attention or resources.
Despite this, landslides have exacted a toll in all 50 states, causing 25 to 50 deaths a year and up to $2 billion in losses annually. The last national map, which shows high landslide risk areas in the Appalachians, the Rockies and along the West Coast, was published in 1982, but it is outdated and lacks detail.
Weary of landslides constantly threatening homes, power lines and underground pipes, some states aren’t waiting for disasters to hit. Oregon, North Carolina, Kentucky and others have used high-tech lasers mounted on aircraft to begin to assess landslide risk and build maps that could be used by planners and homeowners.
The airborne laser, known as LIDAR, fires rapid laser pulses at a surface and a sensor on the instrument measures the amount of time it takes for each pulse to bounce back — building a detailed elevation map, point by point.
These mapping efforts are turning up previously overlooked dangers: More homes and businesses than previously thought are sitting on hillsides, coastal bluffs and mountain areas that could give way at any time.
“We discovered that in most places we had only found a tenth to a quarter of existing landslides in previous mapping efforts,” said Ian Madin, chief scientist for Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries.
Tracking landslides is difficult because all the action happens underground, and slides vary from hillside to hillside depending on soil, hydrology and geologic conditions, experts say, so much so that damage is typically excluded from typical private property insurance.
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