ARLINGTON, Wash. - The search for survivors at the site of a landslide continued Tuesday with the growing fear that rescue workers would find more bodies beneath the several stories of mud, which had the consistency of freshly poured concrete.
Searchers on Tuesday recovered two bodies and thought they had located eight others, Snohomish County District 21 Fire Chief Travis Hots said. The announcement put the official death toll at 16, with the possibility of 24 dead if the other bodies are confirmed.
Authorities were working Tuesday off a list of 176 people unaccounted for, though some names were thought to be duplicates. Officials said the number would change because more people called in after a nearby logging town’s power was restored.
An updated number will be available today, Snohomish County Emergency Department director John Pennington said.
“We’re all still hoping for that miracle [of finding survivors], but we are preparing for the other possibility,” Washington State Patrol spokesman Bob Calkins said in a news briefing Tuesday afternoon.
Hots said the rain that was expected to continue throughout the week would make the search “more challenging.” The work will probably take weeks, he said but added that even a meticulous search was “no guarantee that we’re going to get everybody.”
Emergency officials said the list of missing included not just residents but also home-repair contractors, visitors and people who may have been driving on a state road when the slide began.
Search-and-rescue efforts were continuing where possible on the mile-square site, using dogs, ground-penetrating radar, aircraft and other tools, officials said. Technicians also were trying to locate people in the mud and debris by pinging their mobile phones.
Fifty Washington members of the state National Guard arrived Tuesday to aid in the search, along with search-and-rescue teams from across the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was setting up a command center in the area to help coordinate the work, a spokesman said. Mortuary assistance teams also started to arrive, officials said.
The timing of the slide on a Saturday morning, with children out of school and many adults off work, added to fears that many people were at home when it hit.
Becky Bach, who grew up in the area, said she had not heard from her brother and his wife, Thom and Marcy Satterlee, and two other relatives since before the mudslide.
“We have four of them missing,” Bach said, choking up. “They’re telling us that they’re not seeing anything alive out there. At this point we just want closure. We want some bodies.”
Andrea Hulme, who is Bach’s niece and Satterlee’s daughter, said the slow pace of rescue efforts had been frustrating. Emergency crews have had to proceed slowly through the thick mud and have had to withdraw altogether at times out of fear of new mudslides.
“Everyone is saying they’re only going to be recovering bodies, but no one is looking because they say it’s not safe,” Hulme said. “I’m not capable of saying they are dead right now. They could be dead - but I’m not going to think that until I’m shown they are dead. I just don’t think we should give up hope, because it’s possible they’re out there.”
The area around Seattle has had problems with landslides, and the hill where the slide occurred has been the site of several other slides dating from the 1940s, in part because of its position above the meandering North Fork of the Stillaguamish River, which over the years has cut away at the base of the hill, according to the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
But engineers thought that they had adequately stabilized the hill after a mudslide in 2006. Pennington said Monday that the slope had been “considered very safe.”
Around March 10, he said Tuesday, there was a 1.1-magnitude earthquake near the slide area, but it was not yet clear what role that may have had in the mudslide.
Information for this article was contributed by Kirk Johnson, Ian Lovett, Henry Fountain, Timothy Williams and Alain Delaqueriere of The New York Times and by Manuel Valdes, Phuong Le and staff members of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 03/26/2014