Odd feeling that must be to look out your window and see the Earth coming to get you.
I always thought that if the country side had a lot of vegetation that slides like this wouldn't occur. Guess I was wrong.
My heart and prayers go out to the people affected.
I lived in the Santa Cruz mountains, which had the last big landslide with many fatalities. Here is a write up of that tragedy:
Jan 5, 1982: Landslides kill 33 in California Previous DayJanuary 5CalendarNext Day0 On this day in 1982, (January 5) a series of landslides near San Francisco, California, kills up to 33 people and closes the Golden Gate Bridge. In all, an amazing 18,000 different landslides took place in the San Francisco Bay Area following a very heavy rain storm.
Two fast-moving fronts carrying extremely heavy rain passed through San Francisco in a 36-hour period beginning on January 4, during which the area received an amount of rain equal to half its average annual precipitation. Some areas received as much as 24 inches of rain on January 4 and 5. On January 5, the rain began to trigger thousands of separate landslides in the Bay Area hills.
Almost without exception, the slides caught their victims completely unaware. San Francisco State University professor Kai-yu Hsu was in the basement of his home in Tiburon. Suddenly, there was a deafening roar and, within seconds, the home was gone--it crashed into a park at the bottom of a hill. His son, Roland, witnessed the tragedy while standing just outside the home.
In all, about 7,800 homes and businesses were seriously damaged by slides and falling trees. Roads became impassable when mud and large boulders crashed down onto them. The Golden Gate Bridge even had to close due to a landslide. When seven homes in Love Creek collapsed on a hillside, 10 people died instantly. It is believed that between 22 and 33 people were killed in total. Damages exceeded $100 million, and the region was declared a federal disaster area. It was the Bay Area's worst natural disaster since a 1906 earthquake.
Using aerial surveillance in the days following the storm, officials determined that about 18,000 separate slides occurred. In most areas, homes have since been rebuilt on the original lots, using sub-surface pipes and retaining walls to help prevent a repeat disaster.
I believe a fresh logging road was partially responsible for the collapse. The Santa Cruz mountains were always full of landslides and collapsing stuff. Roads would disappear all the time.
Prayers out to all the families of the missing. The cries for help the other night when it happened have long since stopped.
I just crossed the Stillaguamish river a few minutes ago, and you can tell it’s dammed up.
One of the missing is the wife of one of the local firefighters, who is officially on the rescue crew.
How tragic...
I live a few miles from there. It’s an incredibly beautiful area.
As of now there are 8 confirmed dead but 108 reports of additional missing persons. The 108 is a very fluid number. The death toll may end up less than this, but they have 180 “possibles” on their list. There is nearly zero chance that anyone is left alive in the slide area.
There were 49 parcels of land with structures on them in the slide area. The disaster response team does not know for sure, but an estimated 25 homes were believed to be occupied at the time of the slide. Everything in the slide area is totally destroyed.
Anyone in a car in the slide area is also dead. No one knows how many that would be.
The slide dammed the river, creating a small lake upstream of the slide. The lake has risen enough for the water to have found a channel out and the lake level is now stable. The last I heard there were 6 homes flooded by the new lake.
Right now it is dry. Relatively light rain is predicted to start tonight and showery weather will continue for the rest of the week. Heavier rain is possible Friday.
The source of the slide is still unstable, with small amounts of additional “stuff” still sliding down (I watched one happen). If the additional rain is hard enough to cause much additional material to come down then the new river channel would also be blocked (it is at the base of the slide area, NOT on the far side of the slide). Blocking the river at the same time the river is rising due to heavy rain would be a very bad thing.
We don’t normally expect to make national news around here, but I had a friend email me from Europe this morning asking me for details. So I guess we’ve made the news.
I looked at a larger photo of the area, and it appears that the debris went about one half mile from the bottom of the slope, across the river, through a neighborhood, and across a highway and a few more homes.
The slide occurred at 11 AM on a Saturday, so many residents may not have been home...imagine it at 11 PM on a weeknight with everyone at home and in bed.
This is the best photo I could find depicting the scope of the primary slide
Prayers to the victim’s family. Hope the missing are safe.