Ted S. Warren, AP Robin Youngblood poses for a photo Thursday, March 27, 2014, with Whitehorse Mountain behind her in Darrington, Wash. Youngblood survived the massive mudslide that hit the nearby community of Oso, Wash. last Saturday, and was rescued by a helicopter as she floated on a piece of a roof.
Wind and rain over the weekend have been hampering recovery efforts in the one-square-mile debris field that used to be Oso, Washington before it was obliterated by March 22’s devastating landslide.
The official count of the dead rose to 18 on Saturday March 29 as more bodies were pulled from the wreckage, but the number of missing was reduced to 30, from 90. One of the confirmed fatalities was 4-month-old Sanoah Violet Huestis, who was being babysat by her grandmother, 45-year-old Christina Jefferds. Jefferds also perished. In all, authorities had confirmed 17 dead by Friday evening March 28, though they had found several others who were not yet added to the total, pending identification.
Robin Tekwelus Youngblood was one of the survivors, though she lost everything except a painting. The Okanagon/Tsalagi woman was sitting in her house with a friend, she told the Associated Press, when she heard a roar that sounded like a crashing airplane, then looked out the window just in time to see a wall of mud hurtling toward her mobile home. Within seconds, it was all over.
“All I could say was ‘Oh my God’ and then it hit us,” she told AP. “Two minutes was the whole thing.”
The force of the slide tore off the roof and shoved her mobile home upward. Youngblood and the friend were able to dig out and waited about an hour for help.
Tribes have rushed in to donate personnel, money and other assistance.
Youngblood, whose Cherokee family helped found the nearby town of Darrington in the early 1900s, is still coming to terms with the devastation. Forced out of their homelands when the Cherokee were relocated to Oklahoma and Arkansas, Youngblood’s family had kept going and moved to Washington, AP said. Youngblood moved back to the area from Hawaii, where she had been living until about two years ago.
“Several times this week I’ve said, ‘I need to go home now,’ ” she said. “Then I realize, there’s no home to go to.”
The cherished painting, named “Wolf Vision,” is of a Cherokee warrior, according to the Seattle Times. It came floating by as she clung to the wreckage of her roof, waiting for rescuers. It now is one of her few remaining possessions.
“I’m grateful to be alive,” Youngblood told AP. “I have no idea how I came out without being crushed from limb to limb.”
YAKIMA COUNTY, Wash. — The state patrol’s goal of eliminating traffic fatalities will take the whole community working together to accomplish. A coalition with a school district on the Yakama Nation Reservation is proving that point. The number of Native Americans involved in DUI fatalities has dropped nearly 40 percent in recent years.
Brandon Smith considers himself lucky to have survived a DUI accident.
Luckily, no one was killed. But, Brandon was left with a broken skull.
“I honestly thought I was going to die, because I’ve never been in a car accident previous to that,” said Smith.
Not everyone in DUI crashes is as lucky as Brandon. Native Americans have traditionally seen many DUI fatalities. Nancy Fiander works for Mt. Adams School District; she’s part of a coalition to put a stop to them.
“I’m a lifelong resident, and, growing up and reading the papers, there were times you didn’t want to read the paper because you worried about who you were going to find that you had lost,” said Fiander.
Through several different federal grants, she’s working to turn this trend around. The coalition pinpointed community events that lead to high numbers of DUIs. Emphasis patrols were assigned to these events. They’re made up of Yakama Nation police, WSP, and Yakima County sheriff’s deputies working together. Creating community awareness and stricter enforcement of family and school rules are also paying off.
KIMA pulled the numbers and found the efforts seem to be working.
Just four years ago, Native Americans made up nearly half of all DUI fatalities in our county. That number dropped to only 10 percent last year, with only two out of 19.
“We’re just tired of losing our kids and our family members and our relatives, and so we just want to see if we can do something about that,” said Fiander. “We’re tired of burying our kids.”
It’s education and awareness that saves one life at a time.
This is the fourth year of a five-year federal grant of $125,000. The next emphasis patrol will be this weekend after a men’s basketball tournament in Wapato.
Nancy Fiander will receive a Target Zero award for her efforts next month.
Canadian Inuit have embarked on a unique form of protest against the decision by host Ellen DeGeneres to highlight an anti seal-hunting charity on Oscars night. DeGeneres’ Hollywood megastar “selfie” became the most retweeted snap of all time earlier this month, in the process raising $1.5m for the Humane Society of the United States, which campaigns against the seal hunt.
Ellen DeGeneres takes a selfie with stars at the Oscars 2014. Photograph: Ellen DeGeneres/AP
Now members of Canada’s indigenous population have hit back with their own version, the “sealfie”.
Inuit have begun to post pictures of themselves dressed in sealskin clothing, Canoe.ca reported. The move aims to highlight the cultural and financial benefits of a practice they see as a sustainable, ethical choice.
“The meat feeds families, which is important to an area where many households have identified that they face issues of food insecurity,” said Sandi Vincent, who posted her own “sealfie” on Thursday. “In Inuit culture, it is believed seals and other animals have souls and offer themselves to you. Humanely and with gratitude we accepted this gift,” she said, recalling her first seal hunt at age 15. “My uncle placed some snow in the seal’s mouth when it was dead, so its soul would not be thirsty. If there is one word to describe seal-hunting, I would suggest ‘respectful’.”
DeGeneres’ website says Canadian seal-hunting hunt is “one of the most atrocious and inhumane acts against animals allowed by any government”.
The $1.5m (£900,000) donation came about after Korean firm Samsung promised to donate $1 to a charity of the Oscars host’s choice each time her celebrity-loaded selfie was retweeted.
DARRINGTON, Washington (Reuters) – Search teams picked through mud-caked debris for a fifth day on Wednesday looking for scores of people still missing in a deadly Washington state landslide, as officials reported finding more bodies while acknowledging that some victims’ remains may never be recovered.
The known death toll stood at 24, with as many as 176 people still unaccounted for near the rural town of Oso, where a rain-soaked hillside collapsed on Saturday and cascaded over a river and a road, engulfing dozens of homes on the opposite bank.
The latest tally did not include an unspecified number of bodies that state police spokesman Bob Calkins said had been found on Wednesday. He declined to give further details.
Earlier in the day, local emergency management officials sought to fend off criticism of property development that was permitted just across the river from the caved-in slope after previous landslides in the area.
As hope faded that any survivors might be plucked from the muck and debris that blanketed an area covering about one square mile (2.6 square km), residents of the stricken community and nearby towns braced for an expected rise in the casualty count.
“My son’s best friend is out there, missing,” said John Pugh, 47, a National Guardsman who lives in the neighboring village of Darrington. “My daughter’s maid of honor’s parents are missing. It’s raw. And it will be for a long time.”
Asked whether he expected the death toll to rise significantly, Governor Jay Inslee told CNN: “Yes, I don’t think anyone can reach any other conclusion.
“It’s been very sad that we have not been able to find anyone living now for probably 36 or 48 hours,” he said. “The most discouraging thing is we were hopeful that we would find folks who might be protected by a car or a structure, but the force of this landslide just defies imagination.”
About 200 search personnel, many wearing rain gear and hard hats, painstakingly combed through the disaster zone under cloudy skies on Wednesday, taking advantage of a break from Tuesday’s rain showers to hasten their search for more victims.
Snohomish County Battalion Fire Chief Steve Mason, directing part of the operation, said teams were making slow but steady progress in locating additional remains.
“There are finds going on continually. They are finding people now,” he told reporters visiting the search site. “People are under logs, mixed in. It’s a slow process.”
But Jan McClelland, a volunteer firefighter from Darrington who was among the first to arrive at the scene and has spent long days digging through the muck since then, conceded it was possible some bodies may end up forever entombed at the site.
“I’m fearful we won’t find everyone,” she said. “That’s the reality of it.”
NO HUMAN HEAT SOURCES DETECTED
Bill Quistorf, the chief pilot for the county sheriff’s office, recounted that helicopter crews conducting low-altitude scans of the disaster zone with infrared equipment found no human heat sources in the hours after the slide.
“We located one dog in the bushes, and that was it,” he said, also acknowledging that some remains may never be recovered.
At the same time, authorities sought to whittle down their list of unaccounted-for individuals, with missing-persons detectives from the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office working to resolve likely redundancies on a roster of people whose fate remained unknown.
County officials also started to address criticism for allowing new home construction on parts of the disaster site after a 2006 landslide in the same vicinity, which followed numerous reports detailing the risks of slides dating back to the 1950s.
A 1999 study by geologist Daniel Miller for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had warned of the potential for a “large catastrophic failure” in the area, about 55 miles northeast of Seattle.
“There’s definitely a blame-game going on,” Miller told Reuters. “I’ve always thought it’s inappropriate to allow development in flood plains, in areas at risk of landslides, in part because of the danger to human life and also in part because when something happens, even if no one is hurt, public agencies end up coming in to make repairs,” he said.
The county’s emergency management director, John Pennington, told reporters local authorities had spent millions of dollars on work to reduce landslide risks in the area after the 2006 event.
He suggested that while officials and residents were aware of vulnerability to unstable hill slopes, Saturday’s tragedy came out of the blue.
“We really did a great job of mitigating the potential for smaller slides to come in and impact the community,” Pennington said. “So from 2006 to this point, the community did feel safe; they fully understood the risks.”
But he also said: “People knew that this is a landslide-prone area. Sometimes big events just happen. Sometimes large events that nobody sees happen. And this event happened, and I want to find out why. I don’t have those answers right now.”
Search and rescue operations tapered off overnight but ramped up to full strength again at first light on Wednesday. Searchers used dogs to pinpoint possible locations of victims, as well as electronic equipment such as listening devices and cameras capable of probing voids in the debris.
“We’re not backing off. We’re still going at this with all eight cylinders to get everyone out there who is unaccounted for,” local fire chief Travis Hots said.
The presumed tally of dead rose on Tuesday night from 14 to 24 when county officials reported that search crews laboring in a steady drizzle had recovered two more bodies from the disaster zone and located the remains of eight additional victims.
Eight people were injured but survived the slide, including a 22-week-old baby rescued with his mother and listed in critical condition but improving. The mother and three other survivors also remained hospitalized.
The slide already ranks as one of the worst in the United States. In 1969, 150 people were killed in landslides and floods in Virginia, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
(Additional reporting by Bill Rigby in Seattle, Bryan Cohen in Arlington, Washington, and Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Cythia Johnston, Dan Grebler and Gunna Dickson)
Seattle Times photo. State allowed logging on plateau above slope This aerial photo, taken after Saturday’s landslide, shows part of the plateau that has been logged over the decades. Right above where the hill fell away is a 7½-acre patch, shaped like a triangle, that was clear-cut about nine years ago.
In recent decades the state allowed logging — with restrictions — on the plateau above the Snohomish County hillside that collapsed in last weekend’s deadly mudslide.
The plateau above the soggy hillside that gave way Saturday has been logged for almost a century, with hundreds of acres of softwoods cut and hauled away, according to state records.
But in recent decades, as the slope has become more unstable, scientists have increasingly challenged the timber harvests, with some even warning of possible calamity.
The state has continued to allow logging on the plateau, although it has imposed restrictions at least twice since the 1980s. The remnant of one clear-cut operation is visible in aerial photographs of Saturday’s monstrous mudslide. A triangle — 7½ acres, the shape of a pie slice — can be seen atop the destruction, its tip just cutting into where the hill collapsed.
Multiple factors can contribute to a slide.
With the hill that caved in over the weekend, geologists have pointed to the Stillaguamish River’s erosion of the hill’s base, or toe.
But logging can also play a role in instigating or intensifying a slide, by increasing the amount of water seeping into an unstable zone, according to an analysis of the watershed submitted to the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR).
In May 1988, when a private landowner, Summit Timber, received approval to begin logging above the slope, scientists raised alarms about the removal of trees that intercept or absorb so much water, according to documents obtained by The Seattle Times.
Paul Kennard, a geologist for the Tulalip Tribes, warned regulators that harvesting holds “the potential for a massive and catastrophic failure of the entire hillslope.”
Others echoed his concerns. Noel Wolff, a hydrologist who worked for the state, wrote that “Timber harvesting could possibly cause what is likely an inevitable event to occur sooner.” And Pat Stevenson, an environmental biologist for the Stillaguamish Tribe, cited “the potential for massive failure,” similar to a slide that occurred in 1967.
The agency that issued the permit — the DNR — responded to the concerns by assembling a team of geologists and hydrologists to study the harvest’s potential impact on landslides.
Lee Benda, a geologist with the University of Washington, wrote a report that said harvesting can increase soil water “on the order of 20 to 35 percent” — with that impact lasting 16 to 27 years, until new trees matured. Benda looked at past slides on the hill and found they occurred within five to 10 years of harvests.
In August 1988, the DNR issued a stop-work order, putting Summit Timber’s logging operation on temporary hold.
“1988 was maybe the first time that we were getting serious as to what you should or should not do in terms of logging and road construction around those things,” said Matt Brunengo, at that time a DNR geologist.
GRAPHIC BY THE SEATTLE TIMES; PHOTO BY TED S. WARREN / AP Use an interactive tool to look at the effects of the mudslide.
A week after the stop-work order, a Summit representative wrote DNR, saying $750,000 to $1 million worth of timber was at stake. He listed alternative steps that could be taken to lessen the risks of a slide — for example, having the state relocate the channel of the Stillaguamish River that was cutting into the hill’s base.
“I can only conclude that the real issue here is not slides and water quality, but timber cutting,” he wrote.
Although records indicate that at least 300 acres were harvested on the plateau in the late 1980s, the state moved to prevent Summit Timber from clear-cutting 48 acres considered most likely to discharge water down the slope.
Mapping out the areas most likely to feed water into unstable terrain is “fraught with uncertainty,” wrote one geologist who studied this landslide zone in the 1990s.
Summit Timber was a family-logging business led by Gary Jones, who grew up in nearby Darrington. Jones believed the acreage atop the hill was second-growth forest, initially logged in the 1920s or 1930s. He said the company eventually backed away from its request to log the 48 acres, given the hill’s history.
“It was a little bit risky,” Jones told The Seattle Times. “We decided not to do it.”
Jones said he was always cautious when working around the river, especially considering he was an avid fly fisherman fond of the Stillaguamish.
Kennard, who now works as a geomorphologist at the National Park Service, said the 1988 application was contentious because the state rarely objected to proposed harvests. Getting the DNR to limit the cut’s scope was no small task, he said.
“That was considered kind of a big victory,” Kennard said.
Concerns about landslides surfaced again in 2004, when property owner Grandy Lake applied for a permit to clear a 15-acre tract near the plateau’s edge.
The state rejected the application, saying some of the proposed logging fell within a sensitive area that could feed water into the slope. Working in that zone would require years of intensive monitoring of precipitation and groundwater.
Grandy Lake revised its application, halving its proposed harvest to avoid the sensitive zone. The final plan — a clear-cut shaped like a right triangle — had an eastern border that abutted the area.
The state approved Grandy Lake’s application while attaching conditions, including: “All yarding and log-hauling activities will cease at the onset of heavy or steady rain and will not resume until the rain has subsided for at least 24 hours.”
Harvesting in that area was finished by August 2005.
Officials with Grandy Lake did not return calls seeking comment Tuesday.
In January 2006, a large slide hit, with so much mud crashing into the Stillaguamish that the river was diverted. Where the hill fell away was maybe 600 feet southwest of the clear-cut area.
Saturday’s slide took more of the hill, reaching right up to that triangle.
Grandy Lake has done selective logging on the plateau in more recent years. Following the approval of a 2009 permit that also included an area abutting the sensitive zone, the company reported to the state that it removed 20 percent of the area’s trees. It returned in 2011 and got approval to take 15 percent more.
Staff reporter Justin Mayo contributed to this report. Mike Baker: mbaker@seattletimes.com or 206-464-2729; Ken Armstrong: karmstrong@seattletimes.com or 206-464-3730
Snohomish County Public Works Director Steve Thompson, left, explains the relative stability of terrain at the Oso landslide site on March 24, as Snohomish County Executive John Lovick looks on. — image credit: Kirk Boxleitner
ARLINGTON — Snohomish County Executive John Lovick described Monday, March 24, as “a day of progress and sadness,” as six more were confirmed dead as a result of the Oso landslide on Saturday, March 22, bringing the disaster’s total death toll to 14, and reports of missing and unaccounted for persons in the area escalated from 108 at the start of the day to 176 by the time county officials conducted their third and final press conference of the day, outside of the Arlington Police Station.
Snohomish County Fire District 21 Chief Travis Hots reiterated that firefighters and law enforcement personnel have been joined in their efforts by search and rescue crews, search dogs and heavy equipment from the state Department of Transportation, the latter to move mud out of the way, and he added some words of appreciation to locally based responders, who have provided insights on whether certain homes were likely to have been occupied at the time of the landslide.
“Crews up there are up against enormous challenges,” Hots said. “The debris fields are like big berms of clay and quicksand. One of the folks out there told me, ‘You know, Chief, sometimes it takes five minutes to walk 40-50 feet and get our equipment over these berms.'”
Hots noted that the challenges of working in, much less walking across, such debris have been further complicated by the presence of septic tank materials, as well as gasoline, oil, propane and other contaminants.
“It’s very tedious and slow-going,” said Hots, who relayed another responder’s experiences with “void spaces,” such as houses, out in the field. “He said it’s very tough to even search those buildings, because they’ve been collapsed and compressed with all that material that’s come down. He best described it as like cement, that’s gone into those void spaces, and it’s very, very difficult to get in there and actually search. One of them even told me, ‘You know, Chief, I sat there for an hour, moving material, and only moved maybe about four buckets of material in about an hour.'”
Hots was disappointed to report that crews found neither any survivors nor any signs of survivors during the day, and Snohomish County Department of Emergency Management Director John Pennington likewise acknowledged how discouraging it must sound to hear that the number of reported missing and unaccounted for had increased by so many in a single day, but Pennington emphasized yet again that those consolidated lists of reports are not entirely synchronized yet, and could include duplicates.
“That number is about individual names reported,” Pennington said. “They’re not individuals that are deceased. They’re not individuals that are injured. They’re not individuals that are missing. They’re 176 reports.”
Pennington described the crews’ “strongly enhanced and coordinated response” as improved over their previous two days, and extended his thanks to Gov. Jay Inslee and President Barack Obama for declaring this situation an emergency on the state and federal levels, thereby facilitating assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“They’ve dispatched us a mobile command vehicle from the Mobile Emergency Response System, otherwise known as MERS,” Pennington said. “That’s going to be dispatched out to Darrington to help them establish communications. At the same time, I’m happy to announce that we’ve established an Emergency Operations Center in Darrington, in conjunction with the town of Darrington and the Department of Emergency Management.”
According to Pennington, the federal government is finalizing the details to send a Type 1 federal search and rescue team, in addition to the Incident Management Assistance Team that’s already arrived from FEMA.
“Today, we were able to secure National Guard assistance, in the form of a 50-person search and extraction team,” Pennington said on March 24. “That team is en route here, and they will assist with our search and rescue efforts as well, with very technical expertise that we believe will be very effective in the days to come. The Northwest Incident Management Team — the local regional team from the Pacific Northwest and the northwest part of Washington state — remains on scene and continues to manage this incident, and for that, we’re eternally grateful.”
Pennington not only repeated his request, that members of the public report the names of missing or unaccounted for people to the Department of Emergency Management Call Center at 425-388-5088 if they have not done so already, but he also asked that they send in photos of those who may be missing or unaccounted for, via email at DEMCallCenter@snoco.org, and include the individuals’ first and last names, as well their distinguishing marks or features.
“There is an awful lot of grieving out there in this community,” Pennington said. “There is an awful lot of unknown. That is completely expected. No information at the Call Center can be given out, and what we’d ask of the media and the public is, especially with shelter operations, and those individuals that are in these very tight-knit, very small communities where neighbors know neighbors, and families know each other very, very well and help out, that we would respect the privacy of those individuals as they begin the extensive grieving process.”
Although Pennington acknowledged that it is increasingly unlikely that any survivors will be found at this point, he nonetheless expects crews to proceed as though they’re conducting rescue rather than recovery operations, until such time as they feel the need to stop.
Snohomish County Public Works Director Steve Thompson clarified that certain crews had been pulled out of the area between approximately noon to 1 p.m. and 2:30-3 p.m., due to concerns that the landslide might still be moving, but assessments by three geologists on site determined that there was no additional risk.
“It just turned out to be some sloughing off the edge of the slide,” Thompson said. “Some trees were falling, but nothing deep, nothing to worry about, so we gave a green light to let the rescue commence.”
“Currently, the search effort is directed where there’s most likely to still be people that may need rescuing,” Hots said, before adding that pockets of vehicles, buildings and other structures are most likely to contain any remaining survivors. “There’s other areas of the scene where it’s not probable that there’s going to be anybody, areas where there were no houses. We’re checking the areas where the two neighborhoods were, and along the road on SR 530, both from the Darrington side and the Oso side.”
While the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River is currently flowing in an orderly fashion as it carves a new channel for itself on the north end of the Oso landslide blockage, the National Weather Service’s Flash Flood Watch remains in effect through Tuesday, March 25, due to the instability of the debris dam and the materials in it, as well as the unpredictability of how the new river channel will cut through it.
Fire Crews spray foam to smother accelerants. Andrew Gobin/Tulalip News
By Andrew Gobin, Tulalip News
Tulalip – Tulalip Bay, Stanwood, Getchell, and North County fire departments responded to a garage fire at Sunny Shores around 12:30 this afternoon. Firecrews arrived to find the structure fully engulfed in flames.
With limited water, fire crews were able to extinguish the fire, but not until the structure was almost completely gone. Andrew Gobin/Tulalip News
“There was nothing left of the roof, the walls were almost completely gone, the metal door had melted down, and the car was gone,” said Tulalip Bay Fire Chief Teri Dodge.
Water tenders brought water down the one-lane access road, because there are no hydrants in the area. After extinguishing the fire, crews sprayed foam on the scorched remains to prevent accelerants from reigniting the blaze.
Dodge explained, “Garage fires tend to burn very quickly. Once the fire breaches the roof or the walls, the oxygen feeds it. Most garages have accelerants inside as well, which make garage fires that much more devastating.”
In addition to limited access and limited water, there was a downed power line that crews had to work around until Snohomish County PUD was able to cut power to the line.
The garage burned completely to the ground, leaving only the floor and what remained of the vehicle inside.
Firemen test the burnt out floor to reach the remains of the vehicle. Andrew Gobin/Tulalip news
The fire was discovered by homeowner Heidi Atterson who then called 911. Her husband, Steve Atterson, arrived on scene shortly there after. The cause of the fire has yet to be determined, though it is suspected to have began as an electrical fire.
Ruins of garage fire caked with extinguishing foam. Andrew Gobin/Tulalip News
Andrew Gobin is a reporter with the See-Yaht-Sub, a publication of the Tulalip Tribes Communications Department. Email: agobin@tulaliptribes-nsn.gov Phone: (360) 716.4188
Associated Press
Officials in a rural part of Washington state were losing hope of finding survivors of a massive mudslide that killed at least eight people, injured eight others, and caused as many as 18 others to vanish Saturday.
Snohomish County sheriff’s Lt. Rob Palmer said four more bodies were discovered late Sunday to bring the total number of fatalities to eight. Earlier in the day, authorities said one body had been found on the debris field. Three people were already confirmed dead on Saturday.
Authorities had said that at least 18 people were missing, but that number was given before the discovery of the additional bodies and investigators had described that number as “fluid.” Searchers had planned to continue looking through the night into Monday morning.
The 1-square-mile mudslide that struck Saturday morning also critically injured several people and destroyed about 30 homes.
Crews were able to get to the muddy, tree-strewn area after geologists flew over in a helicopter and determined it was safe enough for emergency responders and technical rescue personnel to search for possible survivors, Snohomish County Fire District 21 Chief Travis Hots said Sunday evening.
“We didn’t see or hear any signs of life out there today,” he said, adding that they did not search the entire debris field, only drier areas safe to traverse. “It’s very disappointing to all emergency responders on scene.”
Despite that, Hots said crews were still in a “search and rescue mode. It has not gone to a recovery mode at this time.”
He said the search would continue until nightfall, at which time conditions become too dangerous.
Before crews could get onto the debris field late Sunday morning, they looked for signs of life by helicopter. Authorities initially said it was too dangerous to send rescuers out on foot.
Rescuers’ hopes of finding more survivors were buoyed late Saturday when they heard people yelling for help, but they were unable to reach anyone. The soupy mud was so thick and deep that searchers had to turn back.
“We have this huge square-mile mudflow that’s basically like quicksand,” Hots said Sunday.
The slide wiped through what neighbors described as a former fishing village of small homes — some nearly 100 years old.
As the search for the missing continued, authorities said some may have been able to get out on their own. The number unaccounted for could change because some people may have been in cars and on roads when the slide hit just before 11 a.m. Saturday, Hots said.
Officials described the mudslide as “a big wall of mud and debris.” It blocked about a mile of State Route 530 near the town of Oso, about 55 miles north of Seattle. It was reported to be about 15 feet deep in some areas.
Authorities believe the slide was caused by ground made unstable by recent heavy rainfall.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee described the scene as “a square mile of total devastation” after flying over the disaster area midday Sunday. He assured families that everything was being done to find their missing loved ones.
“There is a full scale, 100 percent aggressive rescue going on right now,” said Inslee, who proclaimed a state of emergency.
The slide blocked the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River. With the water pooling behind the debris, authorities worried about downstream flooding and issued an evacuation notice Saturday. The water had begun to seep through the blockage Sunday afternoon, alleviating some concerns.
Snohomish County officials said Sunday that residents could return home during daylight hours. Even though the evacuation had been lifted, Inslee urged residents to remain alert.
The National Weather Service issued a flash flood watch for Snohomish County through Monday afternoon.
Shari Ireton, a spokeswoman for the Snohomish County sheriff’s office, said Sunday that a total of eight people were injured in the slide.
A 6-month-old boy and an 81-year-old man remained in critical condition Sunday morning at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Hospital spokeswoman Susan Gregg said two men, ages 37 and 58, were in serious condition, while a 25-year-old woman was upgraded to satisfactory condition.
Bruce Blacker, who lives just west of the slide, doesn’t know the whereabouts of six neighbors.
“It’s a very close knit community,” Blacker said as he waited at an Arlington roadblock before troopers let him through. There were almost 20 homes in the neighborhood that was destroyed, he said.
Search-and-rescue help came from around the region, including the Washington State Patrol and the Army Corps of Engineers. More than 100 were at the scene.
Evacuation shelters were set up at Post Middle School in Arlington and the Darrington Community Center.
Dane Williams, 30, who lives a few miles from the mudslide, spent Saturday night at a Red Cross shelter at the Arlington school.
He said he saw a few “pretty distraught” people at the shelter who didn’t know the fate of loved ones who live in the stricken area.
Twenty-one tribal energy and mineral projects just got a boost from the Department of Interior, including multiple projects to advance renewable energy on tribal land.
On Friday, the Interior Department announced the 21 tribal projects that would share in $3.2 million worth of federal grants. The projects include 13 proposals for renewable energy, including wind, hydropower and biomass. The recipients also include two oil and gas extraction projects and six projects focused on extracting limestone and other minerals.
“These grants are about strengthening self-determination and self-governance by enabling tribal nations to evaluate and promote their energy and mineral assets, negotiate the best agreements with partners or investors and develop these resources for the social and economic benefit of their communities,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said in a release
Not all of the tribes know how much money they’ll receive yet, but renewable projects accounted for the largest chunk of grant money at $1,972,350 for the 13 proposals. One of the tribes to receive grant money is the Crow Creek Sioux tribe in South Dakota, which has plans to build a billion-dollar wind farm. Crow Creek leaders hope the farm will provide free electricity to the 2,000 tribe members that live on the reservation and also generate electricity that the tribe could sell to nearby towns. If the tribe gets enough funding to build the project, leaders say it could produce enough energy to power 100,000 to 400,000 homes.
“We never hardly hear good news,” tribe Chairman Brandon Sazue told the Rapid City Journal of the tribe’s grant. “This was one of the greatest pieces of news I have heard since being chairman for Crow Creek.”
The tribe hopes to secure funding in time to start constructing the 150-160 turbine wind farm in early 2016.
Another initiative that secured Department of Interior funding is Montana’s Crow Tribe, which will receive $655,000 to build a hydroelectric facility at an existing dam on their reservation. That project would also provide power to reservation residents and would have the potential of supplying power outside of the reservation as well.
The grants are helping fund some projects that, if completed, would be one of only a few of their kind on tribal lands. There’s only one tribal-run wind farm in the U.S. so far — the Kumeyaay wind farm in California, which produces enough energy to power about 30,000 homes. The Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma is also working to build a 90-turbine wind farm, but that project hasn’t been completed yet. Government initiatives are looking to jump-start renewable energy on tribal land, however — in 2012 the Department of Energy gave away more than $6.5 million to 19 renewable energy projects on tribal lands, and in 2013 the DOE gave $7 million to nine tribes for wind, biomass and solar projects.
On that day, we will set up camp nearby the White House, lighting our fire and burning our sage, and for five days, we will bear proud witness to President Obama’s final decision on Keystone XL, reminding him of the threat this tar sands pipeline poses to our climate, land, water and tribal rights.
This rally gives a voice to the communities that would be most impacted by Keystone XL, and their message is clear–to protect land, water and climate now and for future generations. The Keystone XL would cross several rivers and the Ogallala Aquifer, which would put wildlife, public water supplies and croplands in danger if a spill were to occur, according to the National Wildlife Federation.
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THIS TYPE of alliance is rare. Ever since the encroachment of settlers onto Native lands, many whites and Native Americans have been at odds, whether over water rights, land rights, hunting rights, etc. Settler expansion laid the foundation for the formation of the U.S. nation state to have access to resources and further expand its interest internationally.
Many of those participating in the Cowboy Indian Alliance are fighting to uphold the protections of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 and 1868. The Lakota (Sioux) signed a document with the U.S. government to create the “Great Sioux Reservation,” to include all of South Dakota west of the Missouri River, including hunting grounds in Northern Nebraska, North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. The treaty stated that “no white person or persons shall be permitted to settle upon or occupy any portion of the [territory]; or without the consent of the Indians, first had and obtained, to pass through the same.”
The federal government signed the treaty before gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1871. The Black Hills are the most sacred piece of land to the Lakota. Mining companies disregarded the 1868 treaty and flooded into the area, under the protection of the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry commanded by Gen. George Armstrong Custer. The U.S. seized the Black Hills and split up the “Great Sioux Reservation” into six smaller reservations in 1877. This culminated with the Wounded Knee Massacre, in which 150 to 300 Lakota men, women and children were slaughtered by the 7th Cavalry.
Now the Keystone XL pipeline would run across this treaty land. The pipeline would not run directly through any Indian reservations, though it comes within feet of them, and it could contaminate the Ogllala Aquifer, the source of water for the whole region. Tribes such at the Rosebud Sioux Tribe (RST) have taken a formal stand against the pipeline. As the Lakota Voice reported:
The Rosebud Sioux Tribal unanimously passed RST Resolution 2014-29, stating that Tribe “objects to and refuses to sign” the amended Programmatic Agreement, a document imposed upon the Tribe by the Federal Government to attempt to meet legally required consultation requirements. Council Representative Russell Eagle Bear said, “It is our job as the Tribal Council to take action to protect the health and welfare of our people, and this resolution puts the federal government on notice.”
The RST is leading a campaign called Oyate Wahacanka Woecun (“Shield the People”), which will set up encampments along the proposed route to resist construction of the pipeline. Gary Dorr of the Nez Perce Tribe called out the Obama administration about its lack of consultation with tribes on MSNBC’s The Ed Show:
I would ask him to look at his own initiative on consultation and these tribes that are all along from Montana all the way down to Texas. We deserve that consultation, we enjoy a special relationship with the United States as a nation-to-nation government.
Basically, the Lakota, like many other Native people see a big infrastructure project like the KXL pipeline, which moves profits from one corporation to another, across their land, as more than a black snake of the fat taker. It is a threat, and there is no new water.
Even state courts are coming down against the pipeline. In Nebraska, a judge last month sided with three property owners who claimed that the state governor’s decision to agree to the pipeline violated the state’s constitution by taking the decision out of the hands of the public service commission that should to review the pipeline.
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THOUGH THE Cowboy Indian Alliance is a rare occurrence, it isn’t the first time Natives and non-Natives have come together to protect their water and land. One clear example is the Black Hills Alliance (BHA) that fought back against uranium mining in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In January 1977–at the same time that the American Indian Movement (AIM) was talking about treaty rights and the Lakota’s rights to the Black Hills at the height of the red power movement–uranium was found in the Blacks Hills. What came to be known as “Custer’s Expedition Part II” began as companies came to drill for profit and to help the U.S. war machine in the midst of the Cold War.
Since the Black Hills is a watershed for much of western South Dakota, Native peoples as well as local ranchers and farmers objected to uranium drilling, because it would pollute and contaminate their drinking water.
This wasn’t only about using land for energy extraction–it was also an attack on Lakota sovereignty, since the U.S. government was willing to sell off mining leases with no contact with the Lakota, much less their consent.
At this time, tensions were high between Native Americans and whites in western South Dakota because of the AIM occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 and the legacy of assaults on and deaths of Native peoples on the outskirts around reservations.
Bill Means, a prominent AIM member, eventually spoke directly with small groups of ranching families, with the message that if the energy corporations had their way, there would be little water left to fight over. Means said he and other Lakota argued that treaties could be a legal means to challenge the mining. In turn, he came to understand the concerns of ranchers about low cattle prices and contamination from pesticides and herbicides.
Out of these discussions, the Black Hills Alliance (BHA) was founded in 1979, organizing Lakota, ranchers, farmers and local environmental activists together, as the Cowboy Indian Alliance does today. Bruce Ellison, one of the co-founders of the BHA, remembers: “You could feel the tension in the air…ever since white people came [to the region], the corporations have used ignorance to keep the people most in common with each other at each other’s throats. We wanted to avoid that being an available tactic.”
As the organizing continued, people’s ideas started to change. Non-Natives started to see that their struggle was in line with that of the Lakota. Marvin Kammerer was a case in point. His family had been ranching in the Black Hills since the land was stolen from the Lakota. In a New York Times interview, he said:
I’ve read the Fort Laramie Treaty, and it seems pretty simple to me; their claim is justified. There’s no way the Indians are going to get all of that land back, but the state land and the federal land should be returned to them. Out of respect for those people, and for their belief that the hills are sacred ground, I don’t want to be a part of this destruction.
The BHA demanded that any exploration permit had to be voted on by residents in South Dakota, rather than the state government just handing over the leases. As a result of the BHA’s organizing through continuous protest and legal pressure, many corporations were forced to give up their exploration permits. For example, in 1979, Union Carbide’s license from the U.S. Forest Service to dig up Craven Canyon without preparing an environmental impact statement was successfully contested by the BHA.
Uranium mining is still being fought to this day by the people of South Dakota, but the experience of the BHA can guide us to what a multi-racial fight against environmental destruction can look like.
Those who support the Cowboy Indian Alliance’s march to Washington, D.C. to oppose the pipeline can learn from the tradition of the BHA. It is part of the hidden history of struggle that we need to revive in the fights of today.
