ARLINGTON, Wash. — The search for survivors at the site of a massive landslide continued Tuesday with the growing fear that rescue workers will find more bodies beneath the several stories of mud with the consistency of freshly poured concrete.
Officials in Snohomish County say they now have had 176 reports of people unaccounted for — up from 108 on Monday — since a wall of mud came cascading down a mountain slope Saturday onto the tiny community of Oso. At least 14 people have been killed.
"We're expecting that number to go up throughout the day," Travis Hots, a local fire official, said at a news conference on Tuesday.
Mr. Hots also said the rain expected to start falling later in the day and continue throughout the week would make the search "more challenging." The work, he said, will probably take weeks, but added that even a meticulous search was "no guarantee that we're going to get everybody."
Graphic | Extent of the Mudslide Aerial image showing the area devastated by Saturday's collapse, as well as structures in the path of the mud.
Emergency management officials have cautioned that the number of people unaccounted for was likely to go down because some of the reports of missing people are duplicates or vague, with little more than a first name to go on. But the sense of an expanding disaster — one that will touch more lives — was unavoidable as the slide's grim dimensions emerged. Emergency officials said the new list 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 are also 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 around the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was setting up a command center in the area to help coordinate the work, a spokeswoman said. Mortuary assistance teams have 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.
Video | Obama on Washington State Mudslide At a news conference in The Hague, President Obama spoke on the fatal landslide in Oso, Wash., and the related state of emergency.
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," Ms. 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 Ms. Bach's niece and Mr. Satterlee's daughter, said the slow pace of rescue efforts had been frustrating. Emergency crews have had to proceed agonizingly 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," Ms. 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."
Oso Community Chapel along State Route 530.
MATTHEW RYAN WILLIAMS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
She added: "I'm hearing that people are going in there to try to dig out their family members. I'd be doing that if I could get there. It's my family. I'm willing to risk my life to try to save them. I know how strong each of them are, and they're probably trying to dig their way out, or waiting for help."
A compiled census of homes and structures in the slide zone, also released Monday by county officials, identified 49 building or residential sites, 25 of which are believed to have been occupied full time.
"Everyone knows someone that's missing or affected," said Juanita Beck, the manager of the Stilly Coffee House here in Arlington, a city where responders have established their command center, about 20 miles from the slide.
Search and rescue officials said that their efforts were still being treated as a rescue operation, but that the chances that anyone might still be found alive were fading. The slide, on a slope east of Oso that also collapsed in 2006, set off a surging torrent of rocks, trees and splintered homes. State Route 530 was covered with about 10 to 12 feet of mud and debris.
Matt Pater, 32, searched through debris.
JOSHUA TRUJILLO / SEATTLEPI.COM, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Linda McPherson, 68, and her husband, Gary McPherson who is known as Mac, were sitting in their reclining chairs in the living room in Oso when the mudslide hit, Ms. McPherson's sister, Irene Kuntz, said in a telephone interview. Their home was split into pieces in an instant. Ms. McPherson's body was recovered soon after, Ms. Kuntz said. But, she said, Mr. McPherson survived and was hospitalized for "pretty serious" injuries.
"He was trapped in a section of the house," Ms. Kuntz said. "The house was split apart, you could say, sections here and there."
Steve Thomsen, the Snohomish County public works director, estimated that a total volume of 15 million cubic yards of earth, or the equivalent of about three million dump truck loads, came down the mountain in seconds.
Mr., Hots, the local fire chief, said Monday in a briefing with reporters: "The situation is very grim. We're still holding out hope that we're going to be able to find people that may still be alive. But keep in mind we have not found anybody alive on this pile since Saturday."
He and other rescue workers described a scene of stark devastation and danger, with the responder teams and their dogs and machines, probing or peering into the soil, still unable to reach certain areas because of the risk of sinking into quicksand-like mud.
They said that partly demolished buildings were compacted with soil so dense that it seemed like concrete, and that the landscape was strewn not just with mud but also with toxic chemicals from crushed cars and oil and propane tanks. It can take five minutes or more to go only a few feet in some places, they said.
Heavy rains that have saturated Western Washington in the last two months are considered a major factor in prompting the slide. But the local terrain — glacial sediments, deposited more than 12,000 years ago, with steep bluffs carved by snow-fed rivers — created the setting in which that precipitation could percolate down.
David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington, said the sediment consisted of a relatively loose mix of materials, including sand, silt, clay and boulders. "The bottom line is, it's not hard rock," he said.
The area around Seattle has had problems with landslides over the years, and the hill where the slide occurred has been the site of several other slides dating back to 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 reports prepared by the United States Geological Survey and the United States Army Corps of Engineers.
But engineers believed that they had adequately stabilized the hill after a mudslide in 2006. John Pennington, director of the Snohomish County department of emergency management, said Monday that the slope had been "considered very safe."
"This was a completely unforeseen slide," Mr. Pennington said. "This came out of nowhere."
Around March 10, he said on 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.
Mr. Pennington said his agency had made periodic warnings to county residents about the risks of landslides. "We've done everything we could," he said.
Amid the devastation, some people escaped death out of pure luck.
Irene Kuntz said her son, Cory Kuntz and his wife had been at their son's baseball game in Tacoma when the mudslide hit. That saved them. But their house was flattened, and their dog, left at home, was missing.
On Sunday, the family went back to the house, hoping to salvage what they could, and they heard the dog, a lab named Buddy, whimpering inside "a huge pile of stuff," Ms. Kuntz said.
"He was trapped under a pile of rubbish, broken boards, lots of mud — stuff that had accumulated into a pile, debris," Ms. Kuntz said. "They started pulling out timbers. They used a huge power saw. And they cut through safely and got the dog out. He's lying in my house right now. He has a cut on his front leg, and he's still very tired, but we're glad he's safe."
Ian Lovett contributed reporting from Los Angeles, and Henry Fountain and Timothy Williams from New York. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
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