DARRINGTON, Wash. - Weary rescuers pressed through rain and their own exhaustion Thursday, searching for more bodies and a perhaps a miracle atop the pile of filth and debris that laid waste to a Washington town and killed at least 25 people.
Rescue and cadaver dogs occasionally led crews to a wrecked car or the ruins of a house containing a body. Teams then began removing the corpse, ignoring the muck that clogged their tools. As the victim was taken away, silence fell over the site.
The main goal now is to find more bodies and winnow the list of the 90 people missing in the mudslide that buried the community of Oso on Saturday.
Authorities kept the official death toll at 16 Thursday, while acknowledging at least nine additional bodies had been located. But they warned the community a higher toll would be announced this morning.
The more than 200 people working on the sludgy heap were clinging to hope that at least one survivor is waiting for them in some pocket of the pile, which is a square mile wide and 40 feet deep in places.
“My heart is telling me I’m not giving up yet,” Snohomish County District 21 Fire Chief Travis Hots said.
The medical examiner’s office has so far formally identified three victims: Christina Jefferds, 45, of Arlington; Stephen Neal, 55, of Darrington; and Linda McPherson, 69, of Arlington. Family members have confirmed a handful of other fatalities. The body of Jefferds’ granddaughter, 4-month-old Sanoah Huestis, was found Thursday, said Dale Petersen, the girl’s great-uncle.
Petersen said he arrived on the scene to help look for survivors to find that work had stopped. A firefighter informed him the infant had been found, Petersen said. He said the news provides closure for the family. Five people injured by the mudslide remainin a Seattle hospital, including a 5-month-old boy in critical condition. Besides the 90 missing, authorities are checking into 35 other people who may have been in the area at the time of the slide.
If dozens more bodies are found or left entombed in the debris, the Oso mudslide could become one of Washington state’s largest disasters. The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens killed 57 people, and a 1910 avalanche near Stevens Pass that struck two trains killed 96.
“We do know this could end up being the largest mass loss of Washingtonians,” Gov. Jay Inslee said Thursday. “We’re looking for miracles to occur.”
The searchers walk on plywood pathways to keep from sinking into the sucking slurry. Their task was made more difficult Thursday by the rainthat saturated the sand, silt and clay that make up the debris pile. The moisture made the already treacherous surface even more unstable and raised concerns about the safety of the collapsed hillside above them.
“Right now there [is] no risk of additional slides, but we’re watching the rain,” said Steven Thomsen, the county’s public works director. “If it starts to move, we’ll pull the crews out, but we don’t see that happening.” A University of Washington researcher now says there were two major slides Saturday morning.
The bigger slide that hit Oso lasted more than two minutes and was followed four minutes later by the second one, wrote Kate Allstadt on the Pacific Northwest SeismicNetwork blog.
Seismic signals also recorded more than a dozen smaller slides that continued for more than an hour.
“The big pulse was the main volume of material that broke down from the slope and tumbled down toward that valley,” said Bill Steele, the seismology lab coordinator and spokesman for the seismic network. “Another big pulse followed that, breaking loose another section of unstable slope.”
The seismic signals showed that the slide was not triggered by an earthquake, Allstadt said. Information for this article was contributed by Rachel La Corte, Phuong Le, Jonathan J. Cooper and Doug Esser of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 03/28/2014