Washington state’s prison system is projected to need 1,000 new beds by 2018. And that growth has Governor Jay Inslee concerned.
Governor Jay Inslee meets with his newly-appointed Justice Reinvestment taskforce.
Credit Austin Jenkins / Northwest News Network
The Democrat Tuesday announced a Department of Justice-backed review of the state’s criminal justice system. The goal is to look for ways to save money without jeopardizing public safety.
In Washington, crime and arrests are down. Still as the state grows, so does the prison population. Already the system is running 2 percent over capacity. To keep up with the growth, Washington has been looking to build a new prison. But what if there was a way to reduce the need for prison beds without releasing people who could be dangerous?
Inslee has appointed a 21 member taskforce to examine Washington’s sentencing system and look for ways to keep people from going back to prison again and again.
“So before we consider investing in a new prison, it really is important for us to take a look at this opportunity to see what smart, common-sense, data-driven, cost-benefit, evaluated efforts we can undergo here,” Inslee said.
Inslee said everything is worth considering from prepping inmates better for release to the early release of aging inmates.
Washington is one of four states participating this year in the national Justice Reinvestment project. That means the state will get funding and support from the U.S. Department of Justice and The Pew Charitable Trusts.
A dying Pisaster ochraceus sea star in the waters off West seattle dangles by its tentacles off an underwater piling that would normally be covered with a rainbow of sea stars. | credit: Laura James
ORCAS ISLAND, Wash. — Drew Harvell peers into the nooks and crannies along the rocky shoreline of Eastsound on Orcas Island. Purple and orange starfish clutch the rocks, as if hanging on for dear life.
“It’s a lot worse than it was last week,” says Harvell, a marine epidemiologist at Cornell University. She’s been leading nationwide efforts to understand what is causing starfish to die by the millions up and down North America’s Pacific shores and on the east coast as well. It’s been called sea star wasting syndrome because of how quickly the stars become sick and deteriorate.
“It’s the largest mortality event for marine diseases we’ve seen,” Harvell said. “It affects over twenty species on our coast and it’s been causing catastrophic mortality.”
Scientists have been working for months to find out what’s causing the massive die-off and now Harvell and others have evidence that an infectious disease caused by a bacteria or virus, may be at the root of the problem. The disease, they say, could be compounded by warming waters, which put the sea stars under stress, making them more vulnerable to the pathogen.
Harvell has studied marine diseases for 20 years. She had thought that the syndrome might spare Washington’s San Juan Islands. Until recently, pockets of cold water and swift currents seem to have protected the local sea star population from the epidemic.
But with the arrival of summer, the waters around the San Juan archipelago have warmed. From what Harvell and her team see as they survey beaches, there’s not much time for these starfish — or sea stars, as scientists prefer to call them since they’re not fish.
Harvell crouches in the sand and points at a withering orange pisaster ochraceus, or ochre star, one of the most common sea stars found in the intertidal zones of the West Coast. One arm is curled over on itself, another hangs by a thread of gnarled flesh.
“The whole arm is flat. It looks dried out, wasted, thin, deflated. Sea stars are not supposed to look like that,” Harvell says, her brow furrowed. “My expectation is that within the next month all of the stars will die.”
The team checked this rocky patch last week and found 10 percent of the stars showed signs of the wasting syndrome. Today they estimate that number has increased to more than 40 percent. They’ve been monitoring sites around the San Juan Islands through this past winter and expect the percentage of infected stars to continue rising as the waters warm this season.
“Over this winter I surveyed here, and looked at every animal and there was no disease at all,” said Morgan Eisenlord, a PhD student in Harvell’s lab at Cornell. “When we came back in the spring we found sick animals so it obviously spread as it started to get warmer.”
A Warm-Water Connection?
Some scientists see a connection between rising water temperatures and the wasting syndrome. The waters around the San Juan Islands tend to be colder than the Washington outer coastline where dying starfish were first reported last summer. Since the arrival of warmer weather this season, the syndrome has spread rapidly to areas like the San Juan Islands that were previously untouched by the syndrome. Recent reports have also surfaced of die-offs along Oregon’s coastline.
Farther south in California where water temperatures are even warmer, starfish have been nearly wiped out, according to Carol Blanchette, a research biologist at University of California Santa Barbara. Blanchette has tracked the spread in Southern California closely, monitoring 30 sites. She says the hypothesis that rising water temperatures could be triggering the epidemic makes sense, based on what she’s seen.
Drew Harvell, Cornell University
“The period of time in which the disease progressed rapidly has been a period in which waters have been warmer than usual winter conditions,” Blanchette said.
While scientists are reluctant to assign blame to climate change, Harvell explained that as oceans warm, outbreaks like this are more likely to occur.
“A warmer world would be a sicker world,” Harvell said. “Under warming conditions a lot of microorganisms do better. They grow faster. They replicate faster. Many of our hosts can actually be stressed by warm conditions. And so it kind of creates a perfect storm of sickness.”
Looking Back, Looking Ahead
Sea star die-offs have occurred in the past, but never to this extent. In Southern California, Blanchette says the die-offs have occurred during warmer El Niño years – 1982-1983 and 1997-1998 most recently –- but the sea star population eventually recovered. This most recent outbreak was first spotted in June 2013 on the Washington coast at a place called Starfish Point.
Scientists believe the pathogen spread through the water, as well as via physical contact (starfish often clump together). Another hypothesis is that the pathogen could also be concentrating in the mussels and clams that starfish like to eat.
Scientists are testing whether shellfish, a top food
source for starfish, may transfer the pathogen.
Credit: Laura James
At the University of California Santa Barbara Aquarium, captive sea stars started showing signs of the syndrome at the same time as their wild counterparts who live on the rocks several hundred feet from the tanks. The captive sea stars are kept in tanks of filtered seawater. In one tank they were fed mussels harvested from the rocks outside. In another tank the sea stars were fed frozen squid.
The animals that ate frozen squid stayed healthy, while the sea stars that ate the wild-harvested mussels contracted the syndrome. Blanchette cautions that these observations are purely anecdotal and the sample size is very small, but she believes this hypothesis merits further study.
With projections for a warm El Niño year ahead, Harvell worries that things will only get worse for sea stars on the west coast.
Scientists at Cornell are narrowing the list of pathogen suspects using DNA sequencing from samples of sick stars and hope to publish their findings in an upcoming edition of the journal Science. Once the exact pathogen is identified and more is known about how the disease is spread, scientists will be better able to understand whether west coast starfish will be able to recovery.
Seeking Boots On The Beach
In the meantime, there is a role for citizen science in tracking the epidemic. UC Santa Barbara and the University of Washington and Cornell University have set up websites where beach goers can share information about the location and abundance of infected sea stars. Then scientists can study how water temperatures, currents and other factors may correlate with the spread of the die-off.
“One of the reasons we’re a little obsessed with trying to learn everything we can about both the causative agent in terms of the microbe and the environmental conditions is to think about what we can do better next time,” Harvell said.
What Happens When They’re Gone?
Sea stars are an apex predator in the intertidal zone. They voraciously consume mussels and other shellfish, and they are referred to as a “keystone species,” meaning that, like in any stone building, if you remove the keystone, things start to crumble.
“It has an extraordinarily significant effect on the biodiversity of the entire community,” Blanchette said. “Losing a predator like that is bound to have some pretty serious ecological consequences and we really don’t know exactly how the system is going to look but we’re quite certain that it’s going to have an impact.”
Scientists inspect young starfish for signs of wasting disease. Credit: Katie Campbell
Looking out at the rising tide on Eastsound, Harvell said, “This area has some of the highest biodiversity of sea stars in the world. We’re not just losing one keystone species, we’re losing a whole guild of stars.”
And the stars here are what’s called an endemic species, meaning they only live on this shoreline and nowhere else on the planet, she explained. If sea stars are wiped out along these shores, there’s a potential for not just local, but global extinction.
She picks up a tiny young ochre star and looks carefully at its malformed arms for symptoms of the disease. If these juvenile stars can find a way to resist the pathogen, local extinction could be avoided, she explains.
“If we lose all of the adult ochre stars and all of the young recruits in the San Juans, then I don’t think we’ll see ochre stars here for quite a few years,” Harvell said.
Story by Ashley Ahearn and Katie Campbell. Video by Campbell. Audio by Ahearn.
Gov. Jay Inslee directed the state Thursday to tackle mounting public safety concerns and develop a spill response plan as oil train traffic continues to increase, particularly in Southwest Washington.
“The Pacific Northwest is experiencing rapid changes in how crude oil is moving through rail corridors and over Washington waters, creating new safety and environmental concerns,” the directive reads.
The governor asked the Department of Ecology to work with other state agencies, the Federal Railroad Administration and tribal governments to “identify data and information gaps that hinder improvements in public safety and spill prevention and response.”
Specifically, the governor’s directive asks agencies to: – Characterize risk of accidents along rail lines. – Review state and federal laws and rules with respect to rail safety and identify regulatory gaps. – Assess the relative risk of Bakken crude with respect to other forms of crude oil. – Identify data and information gaps that hinder improvements in public safety and spill prevention and response. – Begin development of spill response plans for impacted counties. – Identify potential actions that can be coordinated with neighboring states and British Columbia. – Identify, prioritize, and estimate costs for state actions that will improve public safety and spill prevention and response.
He set an Oct. 1 deadline for agencies to respond.
He also said he’ll reach out to other states to develop coordinated oil transportation safety and spill response plans, and pledged to ask the 2015-17 Legislature for money for oil train safety.
The directive comes as the state Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council is reviewing an application by Tesoro Corp. and Savage Cos. to build an oil shipping terminal at the Port of Vancouver. Bakken crude would arrive at Vancouver by train and leave by ship or barge on the Columbia River.
As governor, Inslee will have the final say on the Tesoro-Savage permit. “We will make the right decision at the right time,” he said, without tipping his hand.
The first-term Democrat is in Vancouver all day today. He presented awards to Washington State Department of Transportation employees, and is scheduled to visit a local technology firm, Smith-Root, that is expanding. This evening he will give the commencement address at the Washington School for the Deaf’s graduation ceremony.
SEATTLE — Under the new rules released by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, each state has a specific percentage by which it has to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030.
The average of all the individual state-level cuts will be CO2 emissions from power plants 30 percent below 2005 levels.
Washington has one of the lowest CO2 emissions levels from electricity generation in the country.
Yet, under the new EPA rules, Washington is on the hook to cut those emissions by more than any other state.
“It’s a goal that we can, should and will meet, in part because we’ve already taken early action in our state,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee told EarthFix.
Inslee’s confidence comes, in part, from the fact that his state has already finalized plans to phase out Washington’s only remaining coal fired power plant by 2025.
The plant is responsible for almost 70 percent of the state’s emissions from electricity generation.
That’s almost exactly how much the EPA says Washington has to cut to meet the new requirements.
“Yes, we are ahead of the game,” says KC Golden, senior policy advisor for Climate Solutions, an advocacy group based in Seattle, “but if you measure by what we need to be doing in order to stave off dangerous climate change then we’re behind the game.”
Washington has already committed to more renewable energy and energy efficiency at the state level. But Golden says there’s a lot more work to be done, and the EPA rules are actually pretty lenient.
Golden and other environmentalists say that the state needs to stop buying coal power generated elsewhere. Washington has a dirty little secret: While most of the electricity consumed in Washington comes from hydropower, 15 percent comes from coal.
And a large portion of that comes from plants in Montana and Wyoming.
Golden says the EPA rule will encourage those states to find cleaner sources of power to sell to West Coast states.
“States like Montana and Wyoming have a lot of coal but they also have a lot of wind and sun. Most of the customers are in the coastal states and they want clean power. If you’re in the power supply business, the customer’s always right.”
But wind and sun aren’t always reliable, and the transition off coal won’t happen over night, says Kimberly Harris, CEO of Puget Sound Energy, the largest investor-owned utility in Washington State. PSE gets 30 percent of its power from coal, more than half of it comes from out-of-state.
“You cannot just shut down coal units and expect for the grid to continue to operate,” she told a crowd at the Western Conference of Public Service Commissioners in Seattle last week. “Any type of a retirement has to be transitional because we have significant decisions to make and … this really needs to be a regional approach.
Inslee has been pushing Washington to join regional carbon cap and trade systems –- like the one already in place in California — but hasn’t been able to get the necessary legislation passed.
The new EPA rules will lead to reduced coal-fired power in the U.S. – but the rules don’t apply to coal that is exported and burned elsewhere.
That’s an issue for Washington. It’s currently reviewing proposals to build two coal export terminals.
As coal becomes more heavily regulated and less fashionable in the U.S., coal companies are more eager to ship it elsewhere – despite the fact that the emissions from burning that coal in Asia will impact the climate, globally.
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — Teens under the age of 18 will be banned from using tanning beds in Washington state under a measure signed into law by Gov. Jay Inslee.
Inslee signed Senate Bill 6065 Thursday, and it goes into effect in mid-June.
Users of tanning equipment would have to show a driver’s license or other form of government-issued identification with a birth date and photograph. Tanning facilities that allow people under age 18 to use a tanning device could be fined up to $250 per violation. The measure allows teenagers to use a tanning bed or related device if they have a doctor’s prescription.
California, Illinois, Nevada, Texas, Vermont and Oregon ban the use of tanning beds for all minors under 18, and at least 33 states and the District of Columbia regulate the use of tanning facilities by minors, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
FILE – In this Nov. 6, 2013 file photo is a warning placard on a tank car carrying crude oil near a loading terminal in Trenton, N.D. U.S. Matthew Brown AP Photo
The rapid increase of trains carrying crude oil across the region has raised alarm bells in the wake of a series of serious accidents. Communities and first responders say they can’t adequately prepare for possible disasters because railroads are not required to give any information on the shipments.
That’s about to change, at least to some extent, with a new regulation that takes effect Friday.
An emergency order from the U.S. Transportation Department will require railroads to tell states how many trains carrying highly-volatile Bakken crude are expected to travel through each week, and on which routes.
The order was issued just a week after the latest oil train accident — a derailment in Lynchburg, Virginia — that sent eight-story fireballs into the sky.
A ‘Small Step’; ‘Hardly Where We Need To Be’
“I think it’s a very small step in the right direction,” said Eric de Place, policy director with Seattle’s Sightline Institute, an environmental think tank that has been reporting on what it calls an emerging “pipeline on rails.” He says the new federal rules don’t go far enough.
“Let’s keep in mind, this is not requiring them to use safer tank cars. This is not requiring them to slow down in our neighborhoods. This is not requiring them to inform emergency responders of the dangers,” de Place said. “All they’re having to do is tell us some very rough figures about how many potentially explosive trains are in our states. So, it’s better than nothing, but it’s hardly where we need to be.”
Sightline has been documenting the growth in oil train traffic. DePlace says nationally, it’s increased nearly 60-fold over the past five years.
Info Will Help Communities Better Prepare
Barb Graf, director of emergency management for the city of Seattle, testified at a recent hearing on rail safety before the U.S. Senate.
She says fire departments need to know when mile-long oil trains are passing through. The new rule will help communities better prepare for disasters “in the same way that we have ongoing discussions with geologists and scientists about what’s our earthquake threat, what’s the recurrence rate and that type of thing,” she said.
“This just gives us more information about the kinds of hazardous materials that would be in our community at any given time,” Graf said.
Advocates for more regulation say they’ll keep pushing. They want more specifics on the shipments, as well as tougher standards for tank car safety. They also say it should apply to all shipments of oil by rail, not just the longest trains carrying Bakken crude.
This image of the coal-fired plant in Colstrip, Mont., was made in the 1980s by Montana native David T. Hanson. It was part of an exhibit at Modern Museum of Art in New York. | credit: David T. Hanson |
SEATTLE — The Obama administration’s new rules to cut carbon emissions fueled energy sector leaders’ conversations about the future of coal in the West during their gathering here this week.
The Western Conference of Public Service Commissioners on Wednesday wrapped up its conference — a gathering of the people who decide where the region’s power comes from and how to regulate it.
“The answer is a resounding yes, the question is how much?” said Travis Kavulla with the Montana Public Service Commission. He’s one of the guys calling the shots on what kind of power his state produces, and what it will cost consumers. Montana mines and burns a lot of coal. So, as you might imagine, Kavulla’s not too pleased with the EPA right now.
“The bottom line is that the EPA seems set on establishing state by state goals, based on particular building blocks, a particularly infantilizing term, I think,” he told the crowd.
The “building blocks” include boosting energy efficiency, getting more renewable energy on the grid and using less coal.
Puget Sound Energy, an investor-owned utility based in Bellevue, Washington, gets more than 15 percent of its power from Montana coal. PSE is under mounting pressure from voters and the state government to kick its coal habit, and the new EPA rules add to that pressure.
“It’s very easy for part of our country to be rejoicing after yesterday and say ‘There, we’re just going to shut it all down.’” Well, that’s not going to work,” said Kimberly Harris, president and CEO of Puget Sound Energy. “You cannot just shut down coal units and expect for the grid to continue to operate. And we have an obligation to serve.”
Harris says that transitioning off of coal is possible, but it will take time – and states will have to work together.
“Any type of a retirement has to be transitional because we have significant decisions to make and investment and planning to do as a region. This really needs to be a regional approach,” Harris emphasized.
Washington’s in good shape to meet the EPA requirements, pretty much just by phasing out its only coal plant, which operates in Centralia. But Montana is going to need help lowering its CO2 emissions and getting more renewables online.
But who will will pay for it?
“From an investor’s point of view, all of this looks like a giant investment opportunity,” said Mike Weinstein, an investment analyst with UBS Securities in New York.
Weinstein said investors will be looking to throw money at new technology to cut CO2 emissions at the smokestack or sequester those emissions underground.
Some other winners, according to Weinstein? Renewable energy, natural gas and maybe nuclear power.
He also stressed the role of energy efficiency in helping utilities meet the EPA requirements, and keep costs down.
Hundreds turned out for a Vancouver City Council hearing on a resolution opposing the Tesoro-Savage oil terminal, proposed for the Port of Vancouver. | credit: Cassandra Profita
Monday night had turned to Tuesday morning by the time the Vancouver City Council voted to pass a non-binding resolution opposing what would be the Northwest’s largest oil-by-rail shipping facility.
The vote was 5-2 with Mayor Tim Leavitt and Councilor Bill Turlay dissenting. It followed six hours of testimony from residents, most of them opposed to the Port of Vancouver’s planned facility that would transfer North Dakota crude oil from trains to ships bound for West Coast refineries.
It was after 1 am when City Councilor Bart Hansen made a motion to pass the resolution, which expresses deep concern about rail safety, oil spills and explosions and urges Washington Gov. Jay Inslee not to approve the Tesoro Savage oil terminal.
The council debated whether or not to take the vote in the wee hours of the morning. Turlay said he wasn’t ready to take action. Leavitt said he wanted to make some changes to resolution before voting.
“I’ve been told nothing good happens after midnight,” Leavitt joked in pushing to delay the vote. “I know there are ways to improve the resolution. I hope we can get to a unanimous vote. Certainly, I’m not supportive of it as it is now.”
But other councilors pushed ahead. Councilor Anne McEnerny-Ogle said two-thirds of the testimony and comments she’s heard are from people opposed to the project.
“When I look at all the different e-mails that have come back, the voice says that for this community, this doesn’t work for us.”
Big Crowd Dwindles
By the time the board voted a crowd that had started out in the hundreds had dwindled to a few dozen.
More than 170 people signed up to testify at the hearing. At 11 p.m., more than four hours after the hearing began, the council voted to extend the meeting even later to take additional testimony. By 1 am, the council had heard from 101 people.
The hearing addressed two resolutions on the terminal, but most residents came to talk about the one that opposes the project as a whole. That resolution asks the Port of Vancouver to cancel its lease with Tesoro-Savage and urges state agencies and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee not to approve the project. It also supports new laws and regulations to improve crude oil transportation safety.
The council unanimously approved a resolution that calls for the city to play a bigger role in the state’s Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council review process.The council is in the midst of completing an environmental review of the project and is tasked with making a recommendation to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who has the final say. That resolution supports the city’s intervening in that process by presenting evidence to the state council, making arguments and appealing a decision to approve the oil terminal.
Most who testified Monday night voiced support for both resolutions and opposition to the oil terminal, although there were many who spoke on behalf of project backers Tesoro Corp. and Savage Companies.
Emotional Testimony
The resolutions drew some emotional testimony from both sides.
Don Orange, owner of Hoesly Eco-Automotive of Vancouver, told the council that he’s angry about the prospect of “thousands of pounds of filth” coming into his neighborhood and hurting his business.
“You can call this a terminal. To me, it’s a toilet,” he said. “It’s coming in here on a freight train and we’re flushing it off into ships. This small businessman thinks it stinks.”
On the other side, Port Commissioner Jerry Oliver expressed sadness that the council would consider opposing the project he thinks will benefit the country as a whole by distributing more domestically produced oil to U.S. refineries.
“It makes me sad, not so much that you’re turning your back on the Port of Vancouver, but that you have so little faith in our ability as a community to make this happen,” Oliver said.
Safety And Business Concerns Raised
The Tesoro Savage oil terminal would transport up to 380,000 barrels of crude oil a day. The oil would come from North Dakota’s Bakken fields by trains, be transferred to vessels on the Columbia River and then shipped to West Coast refineries. It’s the largest oil terminal project among the several proposed in the Northwest.
While project supporters noted that the city council doesn’t have the authority to stop the project, opponents of the project said it’s important that the city council let the governor know where it stands.
“It’s difficult to imagine the governor supporting this project if the city of Vancouver opposes it,” said Clark County resident Don Steinke after presenting the council with a box of 2,000 signatures in support of the resolutions.
Vancouver resident Carol Rose says she’s worried about safety in her community if the proposed project is built.
“It’s a tremendous amount of oil, and it’s a danger,” she says. “I’ve lived here for 40 years. I don’t want to have to move because of this.”
Many project opponents voiced concern about the risk of oil train derailments and explosions like the one that killed 47 people in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, last year.
Many who testified in support of the project were employees of Tesoro Corp. and Savage Companies. They told the council that they appreciate the jobs and economic development the oil terminal would bring to the area and vouched for the companies’ track records in treating their employees well.
Jared Larrabee, general manager for Tesoro, said the resolution opposing the project is premature because the Washington Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council hasn’t completed its environmental review.
“The resolution is making a predetermination without having all of the facts, in our view,” he said. “The resolution contains several inaccuracies and assertions that haven’t been validated by the forthcoming Environmental Impact Statement.”
He and other Tesoro representatives supported the resolution that would support the city intervening in the state’s environmental review process. But they urged the council to delay its vote opposing the project or to reconsider it altogether.
Todd Coleman, director of Port of Vancouver, criticized the city’s resolution and said it would damage the port’s ability to do business.
“You can’t have it both ways,” he told the board. “You can’t have a thriving port and all the things that come with that success and then attempt to choose between cargo. A vote for this resolution is a vote against this community’s ability to attract private sector business.”
Suquamish Seafoods employee James Banda packs geoduck for international shipping. T Royal
T. Royal, Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission
Western Washington tribes are quickly recovering from a sudden ban in December 2013 on selling geoduck to China.
The Asian country claimed it received a shipment of geoduck from Ketchikan, Alaska, that had high levels of paralytic shellfish poisoning, and a shipment from Poverty Bay in Puyallup, Wash., that had high levels of arsenic.
As a result, China announced it was ban- ning all imports of bivalve shellfish from Washington, Oregon, Alaska and North- ern California. This was just before the Chinese New Year, a lucrative time for harvesters and buyers, when geoducks are traditionally served.
“It was bad at the beginning because we didn’t know what was going on,” said Tony Forsman, general manager of the Suqua- mish Tribe’s Suquamish Seafoods, which regularly ships shellfish internationally. “China didn’t tell us for two weeks they were doing this.”
Officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been working with Chinese officials to deter- mine how they came to their conclusions and have been in close communication with Washington Department of Health and western Washington tribal officials about the progress.
The shellfish in question from Poverty Bay passed all the rigorous tests needed to be exported to China, said David Fyfe, shellfish biologist for Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission.
“We’re working with China to figure out why we suddenly don’t meet their stan- dards,” he said.
In the meantime, harvesters and buyers are continuing to send their catches to oth- er Asian countries, including Vietnam. U.S. officials are asking China to reduce the ban area from the West Coast to just the two original areas of concern.
File photo of landslide near Oso, Washington. credit: Washington Governor’s Office File photo of landslide near Oso, Washington. | credit: Washington Governor’s Office
A federal geologist doubts the cause of the deadly landslide near Oso, Washington will ever be fully pinned down.
During testimony in Olympia Monday, U.S. Geological Survey scientist Jonathan Godt said heavy rains in February and March certainly contributed to the slide. Geologists have also ruled out an earthquake as a trigger. But Godt says a big missing piece is groundwater flows, for which there’s no data.
“We didn’t have instruments in the ground at the time the landslide occurred and you can’t put the slide back up on the slope,” Godt said. “So from an observational standpoint, that opportunity is lost.”
Godt spoke to the Washington Forest Practices Board, a panel which is reexamining logging rules around landslide prone areas. A Washington state geologist and a private consulting geologist also presented there Monday. None would speculate if historic clear-cuts had anything to do with the March landslide.
Investigators are asking for more money from FEMA to probe why the Oso landslide traveled so far from its origin.
The death toll from the March 22 slide in Snohomish County stands at 41. Two additional people are still listed as missing.
