Washington Landslide

[Gob]

Authorities say they have 108 reports of people missing or unaccounted for after Saturday's huge landslide in the north-western US state of Washington.



Eight bodies have been recovered so far after the 54m (177ft) deep wall of mud swept near the town of Oso, about 90km (55 miles) north of Seattle.

Search crews have worked day and night, using helicopters in the dangerous conditions that destroyed 30 homes.

Several people, including an infant, were critically injured.



He said the list had been consolidated from a number of sources.

"It's a soft 108," Mr Pennington told a news conference, reports the Associated Press news agency.

The number is expected to fall as it is suspected that some of the missing-person reports have overlapped.

Mr Pennington added: "We have not found anyone alive on this pile since Saturday."

Snohomish County fire chief Travis Hots told reporters: "The situation is very grim."

More than half of Oso is missing - a recent census put its population at 180.

Sad and terrifying, our thoughts go out to those affected.

[Lord Jim]

This story would probably be dominating the news here normally, but because of the missing plane and the Russian actions in Ukraine, it's being crowded out and getting very little air time:

Emergency responders and volunteers were to resume search operations Tuesday morning and attempt to narrow down the number of people unaccounted for following Saturday's massive mudslide in a rural part of Washington state, north of Seattle.

Late Monday, authorities announced that the official death toll had increased to 14 after searchers discovered six more bodies in the rubble.

The main focus of the search operations has been to pin down the exact number of people unaccounted for after the disaster. Snohomish County Emergency Management Director John Pennington told reporters late Monday that officials were working off a potential list of 176 people, but he stressed that authorities believed that included many duplicate names.

"I believe very strongly [176] is not a number we're going to see in fatalities," Pennington said. "I believe it's going to drop dramatically." However, other authorities said they have not been able to determine whether there were multiple calls about the same missing person.

The 1-square-mile mudslide struck Saturday morning near the town of Oso in Snohomish County. Authorities have described the search for additional survivors to be "grim" as crews battle uneven ground and rising waters. Monday’s search included specially trained dogs, firefighters, law enforcement, aircraft and search-and-rescue teams. Heavy equipment from the Washington State Department of Transportation helped to move trees, boulders and earth.

"I’m very disappointed to tell you that we didn’t find any sign of any survivors, and we found no survivors today,” Snohomish County Fire District 21 Chief Travis Hots Monday evening.

Pennington gave his own somber diagnosis, saying ""Most of us in these communities do not believe we'll find anyone alive." However, Pennington then added "I'm a man of faith and I believe in miracles."

Authorities believe that the slide destroyed 35 homes, as well as 13 manufactured homes, including RVs, and at least one cabin. Part of the difficulty in determining the exact number of missing people comes from authorities not knowing how many of the homes, some of which are kept for vacationing visitors, were occupied at the time of the slide. Authorities also believe some nonresidents may have been working in the area, while some victims may have been passing through in their cars on nearby State Highway 530.

Another obstacle has been the chaotic nature of the debris field itself. In some places, the ground is covered by 15 feet of rubble.

"It's muddy, in areas it's like quicksand," said Hots. "One of the folks out there told me, 'Chief, sometimes it takes five minutes to walk 40 or 50 feet.'" Searchers are also running into gasoline and septic discharge and dealing with ground that geologists warn remains unstable.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/03/25/2- ... fice-says/

[rubato]

Why did the county let them build houses, and so many of them, below what was visibly an active slide area? In the satellite photo (and on Google earth you can see a clearer picture) you can see that the hillside is moving. via google earth you can see as far back as 1989* (the earliest picture available) that the whole hillside is in motion and if you look at the whole time-series of pictures at several points there was a lot of slippage. Don't they require a geologist's report to approve building permits?

This disaster gave a lot of warning for > 25 years.

yrs,
rubato

[Lord Jim]

Some folks have a lot to answer for; the geologists have been sounding alarms for years... there needs to be a thorough investigation:

Seattle: Since the 1950s, geological reports on the hill that buckled during the weekend in Washington state's Snohomish County have included pessimistic analyses and the occasional dire prediction. But no language seems more prescient than what appears in a 1999 report filed with the US Army Corps of Engineers, warning of "the potential for a large catastrophic failure".

That report was written by Daniel Miller and his wife Lynne Rodgers Miller. When she saw the news of the mudslide, she knew right away where the land had given way. Her husband knew, too.

"We've known it would happen at some point," he told The Seattle Times on Monday. "We just didn't know when."

Daniel Miller, a geomorphologist, also documented the hill's landslide conditions in a report written in 1997 for the Washington Department of Ecology and the Tulalip Tribes. He knows the hill's history, having collected reports and memos from the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s and 1990s. He has a half-dozen manila folders stuffed with maps, slides, models and drawings, all telling the story of an unstable hillside that has defied efforts to shore it up.

That's why he could not believe what he saw in 2006, when he returned to the hill within weeks of a landslide that crashed into and plugged the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River, creating a new channel that threatened homes on a street called Steelhead Drive. Instead of homes being vacated, he saw carpenters building new ones.

"Frankly, I was shocked that the county permitted any building across from the river," he said. "We've known that it's been failing," he said of the hill. "It's not unknown that this hazard exists."

Dr Miller has done analyses for the Environmental Protection Agency and US Forest Service, and was hired by King County in the 1990s to map out its geologically hazardous areas.

His perspective stands in contrast to what John Pennington, head of Snohomish County's Department of Emergency Management, said at a news conference Monday. "It was considered very safe," Mr Pennington said. "This was a completely unforeseen slide. This came out of nowhere."[If the memos and reports referenced in this article exist, this man is either lying or stunningly ignorant for a person who is supposed to be in charge of "Emergency Management"]

The 2006 slide took place in winter, on January 25. Three days later, as the new channel cut the land, "residents and agency staff reported the eerie sound of trees constantly snapping as the river pushed them over," wrote the Stillaguamish Tribe's Natural Resource Department on its website. But the sound of construction competed with the sound of snapping trees.

"They didn't even stop pounding nails," said Tracy Drury, an environmental engineer and applied geomorphologist who assessed the area with Dr Miller soon after the landslide. "We were surprised."

At least five homes were built in 2006 on Steelhead Drive, according to Snohomish County records. The houses were granted "flood hazard permits" that required them to be jacked up 30 to 60 centimetres above "base flood elevation" according to county building-permit records. Another home was built in the neighbourhood in 2009.

Snohomish County Executive John Lovick and Public Works Director Steve Thomsen said on Monday night they were not aware of the 1999 report. "A slide of this magnitude is very difficult to predict," Mr Thomsen said. "There was no indication, no indication at all."

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/seattle-mud ... z2wyotCQVu

[dgs49]

Sorry to be flippant, but this presents some interesting insurance questions. Could this event be characterized as a flood?

[Guinevere]

Not likely. The general common law definition of a flood is water rising from below, to inundate structures above.

FEMA regulations define the phrase “flood or flooding” as “[a] general and temporary condition of partial or complete inundation of normally dry land areas from . . . the overflow of inland or tidal waters [or] [t]he unusual and rapid accumulation or runoff of surface waters from any source.” 44 C.F.R., § 59.1; see also 44 C.F.R., § 9.4. Other federals agencies similarly define “flooding.” See, e.g. 7 C.F.R., §§ 1806.23, 1940.302 (Department of Agriculture regulations); 14 C.F.R., § 1216.203 (National Aeronautics and Space Administration regulations); 28 C.F.R., § 63.4 (Department of Justice regulations); cf. 310 CMR 13.02 (defining “flooding,” for purposes of inlands wetlands orders, as “a local and temporary inundation or rise in the surface water level of any inland water such that it inundates or overflows land not usually under water”).

Yes, I've litigated several flood-related related matters.

[rubato]

Science denialism takes many forms.


yrs,
rubato

[MajGenl.Meade]

Might be that optional Earthquake/Volcano rider would be applicable. Often covers subsidence and "earth movement". Not many people select it though

[Big RR]

From what I read in the paper, riders to insurance for landlslides and mudslides are offered in Washington.

[rubato]

Well that makes it all right then. Visible geological hazards can just be ignored by the counties issuing building permits. Collect those fees and property taxes and wish the game punters good luck!


yrs,
rubato

[Lord Jim]

Well that makes it all right then. Visible geological hazards can just be ignored by the counties issuing building permits. Collect those fees and property taxes and wish the game punters good luck!

Yeah, that was his point...

Rube, have you decided to start trolling Big RR now?

I guess having driven off oldr, you're looking for a new target for your gratuitous unprovoked insults....

Gawd, what a nasty little toxic piece of work....

[Lord Jim]

Something that qualifies as "good" news in this catastrophe:

As more are found, list of Washington mudslide missing drops dramatically

DARRINGTON, Wash. (AP) - Hundreds of family photographs and albums are among the personal belongings being recovered by crews searching for victims at a massive debris site left by the deadly mudslide in Washington state.

More than a week after the slide destroyed a mountainside community north of Seattle, crews using heavy machinery and their bare hands continued their work. Late Saturday, authorities said the number of people believed missing decreased substantially, from 90 to 30.

Officials previously said they expected that figure to go down as they worked to find people safe and cross-referenced a "fluid" list that likely included partial reports and duplicates.

Also on Saturday, the official death toll of victims identified by the medical examiner increased by one, to 18, said Jason Biermann, program manager at the Snohomish County Department of Emergency Management.

Authorities have said they have recovered more than two dozen bodies - including one on Saturday - but they aren't added to the official tally until a formal identification is made.

http://www.wjla.com/articles/2014/03/as ... 01657.html