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 Workers on the mud pile in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains,
northeast of Seattle, over the past two days have taken advantage of
sunny skies and slowly receding water, but more rain is expected on
Thursday and is forecast to last through Sunday.
The official death toll from the slide, based on the number of
victims whose remains have been sent to the coroner's office, rose
to 28 on Tuesday, up from 24 a day earlier, while 20 people were
still listed as missing.
The March 22 slide was triggered when a waterlogged hillside caved
in above the Stillaguamish River.
A torrent of mud roared over the riverbanks and across state Highway
530, engulfing some three dozen homes on the outskirts of the town
of Oso.
The mudslide clogged the Stillaguamish River, which in the following
days cut a slow-moving channel through the mud and debris. But snow
melting on the Cascade Mountains is expected pour through that
channel, possibly flooding the mud pile site.
Sections of the slide area, already under 25 feet of water and
thought to contain human remains, could within three to four weeks
become submerged beneath more than 100 feet of water if no channel
to divert the partially dammed river is built, said Mike Asher, an
area fire chief acting as the head of operations for the east side
of the disaster zone.
"There's a lot of snow left on the mountains surrounding the
valley," Asher said. "We're going to start facing runoff issues from
that in the very near future."
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is working on a plan to dig a river
channel, likely to be accompanied by levies, to keep the muddy,
contaminated disaster site cordoned off, Asher said. If the
diversion goes wrong, the river could flow west down Highway 530,
flooding both the road and homes alongside it, he said.
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Meanwhile, no signs of life have been detected since the day of the
slide, when eight injured people were rescued.
"Where we find a lot of log jams and that type of area, that's where
we're finding the human remains," recovery team supervisor Steve
Harris told reporters on Tuesday, referring to places where most
debris had collected after trees and logs crashed through homes.
The search-and-recovery force included a mix of firefighters,
National Guard troops, U.S. Army soldiers and civilian volunteers,
some from the local community, in an area that supervisors have
mapped out in a three-dimensional grid.
The Snohomish County Medical Examiner's Office said 22 of the
confirmed fatalities have now been identified, including a
4-month-old girl and two other children aged 5 and 6.
(Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis and Louise Ireland)
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