Officials abandoning hope of finding mudslide survivors

Associated Press

ARLINGTON, Wash.

Washington authorities say they have all but abandoned hope of finding mudslide survivors but are keeping the official death toll at 17.

Snohomish County Executive Director Gary Haakenson repeated that number Friday, a day after authorities said the toll would rise significantly.

Authorities previously have acknowledged locating at least 25 bodies but have only recovered 17 people.

Haakenson says he believes crews are finding more bodies in the sodden debris, but the process from extraction to identification by the medical examiner’s office is very slow.

He says officials want to hold out hope for survivors, but “at some point, we have to expect the worst.”

There are 90 people confirmed missing from last Saturday’s mudslide in Oso, 55 miles northeast of Seattle.

The 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 town knows someone who died, and the village 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 an Arlington hardware store. “They just want to have their loved ones, to bury their loved ones.”

That medical examiner’s job, along with the work of the exhausted searchers, was complicated by the sheer magnitude of the devastation from the slide. Tons of earth and ambulance-sized boulders of clay smashed everything in their path, leaving unrecognizable remnants in their wake.

“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 increasingly were 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 also were signs of resilience. Handmade signs have appeared that say “Oso strong” and “530 pride” in reference to the stricken community and state Highway 530 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.