ARLINGTON, Wash. - 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 alive nearly a week after the disaster.
Leslie Zylstra said everybody in Oso knows someone who died, and it 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 a hardware store in nearby Arlington. “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 magnitude of the devastation from last Saturday’s slide. Tons of earth and ambulance-size boulders of clay smashed everything in their path.
“There’s a process that we have in place, and I don’t want to get into too many details of that,” Snohomish County District 21 Fire Chief Travis Hots said Friday. “It’s not as simple as saying this is the number of people that we have that we have recovered.”
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 the number of the state highway 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 have been working from a list of 90 missing people, which equates to about half 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.
Besides the 90 missing, authorities are checking on 35 other people who may 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.
The deadliest landslides in history include one that killed 500 people when a dam in California’s San Francisquito Canyon collapsed in 1928, causing an abutment to give way, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
Storms have triggered other catastrophic slides, including one that killed 150 people in Virginia in the wake of Hurricane Camille in 1969 and another that killed 129 when rain from Tropical Storm Isabel loosened tons of mud that buried the Puerto Rican community of Mameyes in 1985.
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 search-and-recovery team to Washington.
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.
The county medical examiner’s office had formally identified five victims by Friday: Christina Jefferds, 45, of Arlington; Stephen A. Neal, 55, of Darrington; Linda L. McPherson, 69, of Arlington; Kaylee B. Spillers, 5, of Arlington; and William E. Welsh, 66, of Arlington.
The body of Jefferds’ granddaughter, 4-month-old Sanoah Huestis, was found Thursday, said Dale Petersen, the girl’s great-uncle.
Information for this article was contributed by Manuel Valdes, Phuong Le, Doug Esser, Judith Ausuebel, Jennifer Farrar and Susan James of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 03/29/2014