Victims missing in mudslide may never be found, officials say

A mountainside community waited in anguish Friday to learn the full scope of the Washington state mudslide as authorities worked to identify remains and warned that they were unlikely to find anyone else alive a week after the disaster.

Leslie Zylstra said everybody in town knows someone who died, and the village was coming to grips with the fact that many of the missing will never turn up.

“The people know there’s no way anybody could have survived,” said Zylstra, who used to work in an Arlington hardware store. “They just want to have their loved ones, to bury their loved ones.”

Authorities delayed an announcement that they said would substantially raise the death toll to allow the Snohomish County medical examiner’s office to continue with identification efforts.

That job, along with the work of the exhausted searchers, was complicated by the sheer magnitude of the devastation from last Saturday’s slide. Millions of tons of earth and ambulance-sized boulders of clay smashed everything in their path, leaving unrecognizable remnants in their wake.

The slide came after a month of drenching, heavier-than-normal rain, and swept houses from their foundations and crushed them to sticks. Trees were knocked down on the slope above and driven through the community like battering rams, leaving litters of logs to be cut through. Some places in the 1-square-mile slide zone are under 10 feet to 12 feet of that resulting composite mix, while other places, under hummocks left when the earth stopped moving, might have 10 or more feet on top of that.

“It’s just 50 feet of just a mess, and it’s churned up with timber and house parts and cars,” said Bob DeYoung, a volunteer on a rescue crew, about the mud-devastated landscape.

In addition to bearing the stress of the disaster, townspeople were increasingly frustrated by the lack of information from authorities, said Mary Schoenfeldt, a disaster traumatologist who has been providing counseling services at schools and for public employees and volunteers.

“The anger and frustration is starting to rise,” she said.

That’s normal for this phase of a disaster, as is the physical toll taken by not having eaten or slept normally in days, she said.

There were also signs of resilience. Handmade signs have appeared that say “Oso strong” and “530 pride” in reference to the stricken community and state Highway 530 that runs through it.

Authorities have acknowledged the deaths of at least 25 people — with 17 bodies recovered. Reports of more bodies being found have trickled in from relatives and workers on the scene.

Searchers are working from a list of 90 missing people, which equates to about half of the population of Oso, a North Cascades foothills community some 55 miles northeast of Seattle.

That list has not been made public, but officials have said it includes not just residents who may have been in their homes but others thought to be in the area or traveling the highway when the slide struck.

Authorities have all but eliminated the possibility that some people on the list may have been out of the area and simply have not checked in. And they warned the chances of finding anyone alive amid the tons of silt and mud was slim.

“I would say there’s always some hope, but,” Tom Miner said Thursday, trailing off before finishing his thought. He is an urban search-and-rescue leader for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Besides the 90 missing, authorities are checking on 35 other people who may or may not have been in the area at the time of the slide.

The mudslide could go down as one of Washington’s worst disasters, along with the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens that killed 57 people and a 1910 avalanche near Stevens Pass that swept away two trains and killed 96.

Rescuers, military personnel, volunteers and search dogs pressed on Friday, driven by the hope of finding at least one survivor. But the operation had changed, said Snohomish County fire battalion commander Steve Mason.

“It started with hasty searching,” he said. Now “we want to be more methodical.”

Crews that had worked for days in the rain and mud were getting some relief as replacements arrived. The Colorado National Guard sent 16 members of its fatality search-and-recovery team to the area.

A new crew of volunteer diggers showed up in an Arlington school bus Friday and marched single file toward the debris pile.

“There are people down here digging for their loved ones,” Mason said.