RELATED PRESS
The Landslide Bear Memorial, designed by artist Tsovinar Muradyan and Classic Foundry, is on view ahead of its Feb. 17 opening in Oso, Washington.
OSO, Wash. >> After the mountainside collapsed, wiping out a community and 43 lives in the worst landslide in U. S. history, Jessica Pzsonka made a promise: to herself, her personal family members and her deceased sister, who was buried along the mountain. two young children, her husband and her in-laws.
Pszonka would see a permanent memorial created where family and visitors could feel his sister’s presence and reflect on the serenity that drew Oso to the circle of relatives, as well as the forces that left a huge scar in the forested foothills of Cascade Mountain along the river’s North Fork. Stillaguamish River, 89 km northeast of Seattle.
Ten years later, the tribute is over and Pszonka is leaving: he has put his space up for sale and moves, with his parents, to Texas.
“I want to get them out of here,” he says. They can’t get away with it. It’s like it happened yesterday, every day, when they walk past the school the children have gone to.
The trauma that hit Oso, a rural network of a few hundred people, on March 22, 2014, was a national wake-up call about the risks of landslides. Washington state has begun hiring more staff and mapping to better manage risk, and has tightened rules on clearing landslide-prone slopes, fearing that clear-cutting near the most sensitive part of the scar may have contributed to the disaster.
In 2020, Congress passed the National Landslide Preparedness Act to create a national strategy to identify, understand, and oppose landslides, a law pushed by Washington state lawmakers, bringing together Democratic Rep. Suzan DelBene.
“It was really hard for anyone to believe how big the impact was; You really had to be there to see one side of a mountain collapsing into the valley and coming up the other side, wiping out an entire community. DelBene said. Personally, I’ve tried to do everything I can to make sure that a natural crisis like this doesn’t turn into another national tragedy. “
However, landslides are becoming more likely for more people as climate change intensifies storms and wildfires, destabilizing soils. Predicting landslides remains a challenge, although some research projects have been able to determine the conditions under which certain types might occur.
In the years since Oso, landslides after wildfires have been incredibly common in California, where mudslides killed another 23 people and destroyed many homes in Montecito in 2018.
More than 500 landslides were recorded in Los Angeles after torrential rains this year; Another destroyed a space last week.
Areas that didn’t burn also suffered, such as the temperate mountain rainforest of southeast Alaska, which has experienced three fatal landslides on saturated hillsides since 2015. The most recent killed six other people in Wrangell last November.
Landslides occur throughout the United States, and are added in the Southeast after hurricanes. But Brian Collins, a civil engineer with the U. S. Geological Survey who helped examine the Oso landslide, noted that in the “steeper terrain of the western U. S. and Alaska, they have a tendency to be and, as we see, there have been a number of devastating landslides in the last 10 years.
It was 10:37 a. m. on a sunny Saturday, after weeks of heavy rain, when the hillside gave way with a roar and a crash; some locals thought they were Navy planes flying overhead. Some 19 million tonnes of sand and ancient glacial deposits. . . Enough to cover 700 football fields 10 feet deep, it crossed the river at an average speed of 40 mph (64 km/h), aquaplaning the valley’s saturated terrain “like an air hockey table,” Collins said.
The tsunami of soggy earth and pulverized wood hit Steelhead Haven, a subdivision of 35 homes. The road that ran along the construction was buried at an intensity of 6. 1 meters.
Landslides have occurred on the hillside, in addition to large prehistoric landslides. In 2006, a dam was built on the river, and earlier, technical reports had warned of a possible “major catastrophic rupture” and a “significant threat to human life and personal property. “”The authorities have thought about buying houses in the area to keep other people away.
But even those reports didn’t suggest that anything could happen in the order it did. Locals said they had no idea of the danger; Housing construction continued even after the 2006 crash. Washington state and the company operating the logging operation on the slope paid more than $70 million to settle lawsuits filed by victims of the 2014 landslide and their families.
It was the deadliest landslide in U. S. history, according to the National Science Foundation-backed geotechnical team that tested it. Nine other people survived, in addition to a mother and her baby, who were reunited at the hospital two weeks later.
Tim Ward lost his wife of 37 years, Brandy, and 4 of their five dogs. He described how he regained consciousness 500 meters (457 meters) from where his home once stood, in a hole 15 feet (4. 6 meters) deep, with an opening in the most sensible, the length of a kitchen dish. Rescuers eventually managed to extract him.
Many of those affected — retirees, grandparents, veterans, labor workers, young families — were simply at home for a weekend. Others were there: three contractors working on a house. Someone installs a satellite dish for satellite TV. A plumber maintains a water tank.
Summer Raffo, 36, driving down State Route 530 to shoe a horse for a client. A few seconds faster or later, everything would be fine for her. Instead, the slide buried her, ripping off the roof of 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 his brother. You have to stop by to locate her. After five days digging in the mud, investigators discovered Raffo’s car and called Brunner to remove the body. His hands were still on the steering wheel and the speedometer read 97 km/h.
In an ordinary effort, groups of 900 rescuers from near and far, as well as volunteers — firefighters and police, local army and loggers — helped locate each victim, recording what they called “the pile” as the rain fell. They silenced their chainsaws and other machines whenever they found dead bodies. The latest victim was found in July, about three months after the official search ended.
Brunner, Pszonka and other family members spent years working at the monument — hosting fundraisers, lobbying lawmakers for money and attending planning committee meetings. They sought to honor not only the lives lost, but also the community’s response.
“Maybe we’ll be here and say they never found out my nephew, who is one of the last” to be discovered, Pszonka said. “To the firefighters, the search and rescue people, the rescue dogs and each and every one of the others who promised to help. “Stay until each and every user is discovered, I will thank you for that. “
Pszonka’s sister and her husband, Katie and Shane Ruthven, owned a thriving glass repair business. The boys, Hunter and Wyatt, ages 6 and 4, enjoyed soccer. Pszonka and his parents got tattoos. But holidays, birthdays. . . Every day, they are not the same. So they leave to start over,” he says.
The $3. 8 million memorial includes large curved steel panels made by Seattle artist Tsovinar Muradyan for the family, with cut-out designs filled with colorful epoxy — butterflies for Pszonka’s nephews. Raffo includes a portrait of her with her favorite horse.
Raffo is quiet and reserved, funny, trustworthy and an incredibly hard worker, Brunner said.
“From day three, when the truth became apparent, I knew I was going to tell everyone how special my sister was to me, to my mom and to my whole family, and I was going to let them know who I was,” Brunner said. “And to do this tribute is to do that for me. “
Have comments? Learn more here.
Click here for our full information on the coronavirus outbreak. Submit your coronavirus news.
Back to top