That Saturday Morning

Where were you Saturday morning? What were you doing about 11:00? 

As you know, I was enjoying a stroll in a beautiful garden on a lovely spring morning. It wasn't until much later in the day that I began to realize the tragedy that was unfolding just about 75 mile north.

I spent a lot of time yesterday evening and this morning trying to find exactly where the slide occurred and just what the community looked like.  If you use Google Maps you can actually zoom in for close ups of the homes that were there just east of Oso, Washington. It looks like a beautiful place to live. 

I captured this view off of Google Maps showing the community before Saturday morning. The white area in the upper right quadrant is the scar from a previous slide.

This drawing was on the front page of the Seattle times this morning. The top of the new slide, as shown in the upper left here, is much higher. And in both photos you can see what is in the path of the mud slide. There were 59 vacant lots in the slide area, 49 more with some kind of structure, and 25 which were most likely occupied full time.  They are buried under up to 20 feet of mud.

Highway 530, the main access to this somewhat remote area, was also buried. 

If you lived here and you were in your home or working in your yard, as many of us are on a Saturday morning, you are probably gone.  If you were kids watching TV with your dad, you are gone. If you are parents just returning from grocery shopping or heading out to your kid's sporting event, or going fishing on a sunny morning and you were on that section of highway, you are gone. If you were one of three workmen called out by a young woman, a nurse, who just bought her dream house that needed a plumber,  an electrician, and a technician from Dish Network, you are gone, along with her.

So far 7 people were rescued alive, 14 dead have been recovered, and up to 176 have been reported missing. The missing number will go down some as duplicate reports are discovered or people are located somewhere else, but with the mud now settling like concrete where it isn't still like quicksand, it will be a long time before recovery is complete.

The dammed up river caused flooding upstream, but is now releasing the pressure by cutting a new channel through the mud. The new channel is about where an old one was before a previous slide. 

Yes, there were warnings that another cataclysmic slide could occur here.  But we live in the here and now, and we trust our luck that it won't happen to us.

Sometimes it does.