Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Mudslide toll will grow


So far they have found only 14 bodies, but the number of missing people reports has grown.
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.”

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.
The slide hit on a Saturday morning, a time when many people would have been home. Our hearts go out to all those affected.

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