10 years after the deadliest US landslide, climate change is increasing the danger

OSO, Washington — After the mountainside collapsed, destroying a neighborhood and 43 lives in the worst landslide disaster in American history, Jessica Pzsonka made a promise to herself, to her bereaved parents and to her late sister, who was buried with two young sons. husband and in-laws.

Pszonka would see a permanent memorial created where relatives and visitors could feel her sister’s presence and reflect on the serenity that drew the family to Oso, as well as the forces that left a huge scar in the forested foothills of Cascade Mountain along the northern fork of the river. Stillaguamish River, 89 km northeast of Seattle.

Ten years later, that commemoration is completed and Pszonka leaves: she puts her house up for sale and moves to Texas with her parents.

“I have to get them out of here,” she said. “They can’t get away from it. It’s like it happened yesterday, every day, as they drive past the school the kids would have gone to.

The trauma that engulfed Oso, a rural community of a few hundred residents, on March 22, 2014, was a national wake-up call about the dangers of landslides. Washington state began hiring more staff and conducting more mapping to better control the risk, and tightened guidelines for logging landslide-prone slopes amid concerns that clear-cutting at the top of the scar could have helped cause the disaster.

Congress passed the National Landslides Preparedness Act in 2020 to create a national strategy for identifying, understanding and protecting against landslides — legislation pushed by Washington state lawmakers, including Democratic Rep. Suzan DelBene.

“It was hard for anyone to imagine how enormous the impact was – that you had to actually be there to see this side of a mountain collapse into the valley and rise again on the other side, leaving an entire community was wiped out,” DelBene said. “Personally, I wanted to do everything I could to ensure that a natural disaster like this would not become another national tragedy.”

Nevertheless, landslides are likely to affect more and more people as climate change intensifies storms and forest fires, destabilizing soils. Predicting slides remains difficult, although some research projects have helped identify the conditions under which certain types may occur.

In the years since Oso, landslides following wildfires have become alarmingly frequent in California, where mudslides killed 23 people and destroyed hundreds of homes in Montecito in 2018.

In Los Angeles alone, more than 500 mudslides were recorded after heavy rains early this year; another destroyed a house last week.

Areas that did not burn have also suffered, such as the mountainous temperate rainforest of Southeast Alaska, where three deadly landslides have occurred on saturated slopes since 2015. The most recent left six people dead in Wrangell last November.

Landslides happen all over the US, including in the Southeast after hurricanes. But Brian Collins, a civil engineer with the US Geological Survey who helped study the Oso slide, noted that in the “steeper terrain of the western US and Alaska they are common and – as we see – there are…certainly a number of devastating landslides in the last decade.”

None more so than Oso. It was 10:37 a.m. on a sunny Saturday morning, after weeks of heavy rain, when the hillside gave way in a scraping, crashing roar – some residents thought it was the Navy planes that often fly overhead. About 19 million tons of sand and ancient glacial deposits – enough to cover 700 football fields 10 feet deep – rushed down the river at an average speed of 40 miles per hour, hydroplaning on the saturated valley floor. like an air hockey table,” Collins said.

The tsunami of soggy earth and pulverized wood slammed into Steelhead Haven, a subdivision of 35 homes. The highway that ran alongside it was buried 20 feet (6.1 meters) deep.

There was a history of landslides on the slope, including massive prehistoric landslides. In 2006, the river was dammed by one dam, before which technical reports had warned of a potential “major catastrophic failure” and “significant risk to human life and private property.” Officials considered buying up homes in the area to keep people out.

But even those reports did not suggest that anything could happen in the order of what did happen. Residents said they had no idea of ​​the danger; Homes continued to be built even after the 2006 crisis. Washington state and the company that logged over the slope paid more than $70 million to settle lawsuits from the 2014 disaster victims and their families.

It was the deadliest landslide in U.S. history, according to the National Science Foundation-backed geotechnical team that assessed the landslide. Nine people survived, including a mother and baby who were reunited at a hospital two weeks later.

Tim Ward lost his wife of 37 years, Brandy, and four of his five dogs. He described regaining consciousness 1,500 feet from where his house once stood, in a hole 15 feet deep, with an opening at the top the size of a kitchen saucer. Rescuers eventually got him out.

Many of the victims – retirees, grandparents, military veterans, office workers, young families – were simply at home over the weekend. Others happened to be there too: three contractors working on a house. Someone installing a satellite dish. A plumber servicing a hot water tank.

Summer Raffo, 36, was driving on State Route 530 on her way to shoe a horse for a customer. A few seconds sooner or later, it would have been fine. Instead, the slide buried her, ripping the roof off her blue Subaru.

Raffo’s older brother, Dayn Brunner, was a tribal police officer at the time. His mother called him that day and said, ‘You are her brother. You have to go find her.” He and his teenage sons went past police barricades and spent five days sifting through the mud. When searchers finally found Raffo’s car, they called Brunner to lift her body out. Her hands were still on the wheel. The speedometer showed 97 km/h.

In an extraordinary effort, teams of 900 first responders from near and far plus volunteers – firefighters and police, military members and local loggers – helped find each victim, often plowing through what they called “the pile” as the rain fell. silenced their chainsaws and other machines when they discovered bodies. The last victim appeared in July, about three months after the official search ended.

Brunner, Pszonka and other family members have worked on the monument for years, holding fundraisers, lobbying lawmakers for money and attending planning commission meetings. They wanted to honor not only the lives lost, but also the community’s response.

“We could stand here and talk about how they never found my only cousin, who was one of the last found,” Pszonka said. “To those firefighters and search and rescue people and rescue dogs and all the people who promised to stay until everyone was found, I will be forever grateful.”

Pszonka’s sister and her husband, Katie and Shane Ruthven, had a thriving glass repair business. The boys, Hunter and Wyatt, ages 6 and 4, loved football. Pszonka and her parents got tattoos to help them remember them. But holidays, birthdays – any days – are not the same. So they’re leaving to make a fresh start, she said.

The $3.8 million memorial features large, curved metal panels by Seattle artist Tsovinar Muradyan for each family, with cut-out designs filled with colorful epoxy butterflies for Pszonka’s cousins. Raffo’s includes a portrait of her with her favorite horse.

Raffo was quiet and reserved, funny, reliable and an incredibly hard worker, Brunner said.

“Since Day 3, when reality set in, I knew I was going to explain to everyone how special my sister was to me, to my mother, to my entire family, and let them know who the person she was. Brunner said. “And doing this memorial is doing that for me.”

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Bohrer reported from Juneau, Alaska.