Worst feared after mud wall flattens town
Print Edition
FAMILY and friends of 90 people still missing after a wall of mud flattened the outskirts of a rural Washington state town increasingly feared for the worst yesterday as the governor called for a statewide moment of silence a week after the disaster.
“The number is so big and it’s so negative. It’s hard to grasp,” said 66-year-old Bob Michajla, a volunteer who has been helping search part of the 2.6-square-kilometer debris field. “These are all friends and neighbors and family. Everybody knows everybody in this valley.”
The number of people presumed dead grew to 27 on Friday as officials said one more body had been located in a field of muck and debris left when a rain-soaked hillside collapsed without warning on March 22, engulfing dozens of homes on the outskirts of Oso, northeast of Seattle.
But the official death toll lagged at 17, based on bodies found, extricated and identified, a process complicated by the fact that some remains have not been found intact.
Authorities have located 10 more bodies in recent days but those are not yet included in the official toll. Officials have repeatedly warned the number could soon rise substantially.
An estimated 180 people lived in the path of the landslide, and authorities said on Friday they were bracing for the worst for those still listed as missing in one of the strongest official acknowledgments that many of those lives may be lost.
“We always want to hold out hope but I think we have to at some point expect the worst,” Snohomish County Executive Director Gary Haakenson told a Friday evening news conference.
“The crews are finding bodies in the field. It’s a very slow process. It was miserable to begin with. As you all know, it’s rained heavily the last few days. It’s made the quicksand even worse,” he said.
The plight of the Spillers family has garnered much attention. Postings on memorial web pages say Billy Spillers, 30, was at home with his four children when the hillside collapsed onto their home. Four-year-old Jacob Spillers was pulled out alive but his sister Kaylee, 5, was found dead. Billy and his two other children are still unaccounted for. The mother was not at home and survived.
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