The Seattle Times Staff

Three Dead: 6-month old baby and nearly a dozen others hospitalized

Homes Destroyed: Search for survivors continued into the night; voices heard yelling for help

Flood Threat: Stillaguamish River blocked, flash-flood watch from Oso to Stanwood

By Angel Gonzales, Coral Garnick and Jack Broom

OSO, Snohomish County — Searchers looking for victims of the massive mudslide in eastern Snohomish County reported hearing voices — possibly from children — coming late Saturday from an area hit by the slide.

“This is a massive slide, and we are in a very, very fluid and unstable situation,” said Travis Hots, Snohomish County district fire chief.

“This is still a rescue mission.”

With three people known dead, six homes destroyed and a state highway severed by Saturday’s massive mudslide, officials advised people downstream of the slide to evacuate, fearing that further damage could occur.

Residents between the slide area and Arlington, 15 miles to the west, were advised to leave their homes for the night, because of the danger that the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River could burst through the blockage created by the slide and cause immediate, severe flooding.

About a dozen people were injured as the wall of mud crashed through homes, and rescuers continued searching for victims into the evening.

The power, speed and severity of the slide were spectacular, as it swept over a 360-yard-long section of roadway with mud and debris up to 20 feet deep.

“In three seconds, everything got washed away,” said Paulo de Oliveira of Lynnwood, who was driving on Highway 530 when the slide hit around 11 a.m. “Darkness covering the whole roadway and one house right in the middle of the street.”

De Oliveira said he was behind two other vehicles when the slide hit.

“I came within about 50 feet of being washed out.”

He got out of his car and heard a woman scream from one of the swamped houses.

“Along the river, I saw one place where there were two homes and they were just gone. Nothing left but a portable toilet ... destruction all around.”

Saturday evening, state highway crews were prepared to close bridges downstream — even one over Interstate 5 — when water surges through the blockage.

“A river has got a lot of energy in it. When you’ve got a plug, the pressure is going to build up and it’s going to blow,” said Bart Treece, of the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT).

Because a rush of water could erode bridge supports, WSDOT doesn’t want anyone on the spans until after the torrent has passed and any damage been inspected, he said. One of two I-5 spans over the river was built in the 1930s and is of particular concern, Treece said.

The slide hit about four miles east of the town of Oso, said Lt. Rodney Rochon, head of the Snohomish County sheriff’s special operations unit. Authorities were unsureexactly how many homes were damaged and were searching for additional victims through the day.

Rochon said a 6-month-old baby was airlifted to Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center. Hospital spokeswoman Susan Gregg said the baby was in critical condition. Four other victims were also in Harborview: a 68-year-old man in critical condition; an 81-year-old man in critical condition; a 37-year-old man in serious condition; and another man, age and condition unknown, Gregg said.

Cascade Valley Hospital in Arlington received five victims, one of whom was later released. Three of the four apparently had minor injuries.

Skagit Valley Hospital in Mount Vernon reported that it was treating a 68-year-old man in serious condition.

The mudslide sent tons of debris into the river, causing the river to overflow its banks.

Robin Youngblood was sitting in the living room with her friend, Jetty Dooper, when they heard a crack.

“All of a sudden there was a wall of mud” about 25 feet high, she said. “Then it hit and we were rolling. The house was in sticks. We were buried under things, and we dug ourselves out.”

Youngblood said she scrambled onto the top of the clothes dryer, and Dooper onto a dishwasher. Covered in mud and shivering, they waited for perhaps an hour until they were lifted a short distance by helicopter and placed on an ambulance, Youngblood said.

Fearing a potential for flooding, officials asked residents near the slide to evacuate their homes. An emergency shelter was opened at Post Middle School in Arlington. Officials urged people to stay away from the area Saturday afternoon as the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River threatened to break through or spread around the debris dam, potentially causing further destruction.

“While we are not issuing an evacuation order at this time, we need residents upstream and downstream of the slide to prepare to leave their homes at a moment’s notice,” said Bronlea Mishler, deputy director of communications for Snohomish County.

“We are asking residents to prepare their homes, pets, livestock, etc., for immediate evacuation if and when it becomes necessary.”

A river gauge immediately downstream of the mudslide showed the water level had dropped from 3.1 feet to .9 feet an hour after the landslide occurred. By 3:30 p.m., it had dropped to .25 feet.

More than 100 rescuers searched inside the destroyed houses. One of the search teams had to be rescued after it got stuck in the mud.

Two hovercrafts were brought to the area for rescue efforts.

David Logan, 58, of Seattle, was among those waiting near the barricade on Highway 530. He said his brother lives in the slide area and he hadn’t heard from him.

“I know his house is destroyed,” Logan said.

Rochon said rescue operations and a broader search will need to be completed before heavier equipment can be brought in.

Red Cross officials converged on Post Middle School in Arlington, where they set up a shelter for victims of the slide and evacuated residents.

Red Cross disaster-relief coordinator Andy Hamack said the best thing members of the community can do is donate money.

Snohomish County has been saturated with rain this month, establishing the kind of unstable terrain that can lead to mudslides, said Johnny Burg, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Seattle Times staff reporters Mike Carter, Paige Cornwell, Mike Lindblom and Ken Armstrong and news researcher Miyoko Wolf contributed to this report.

Death toll now at 8: Casualties expected to rise when rescuers can reach dangerous area

'Nightmare scenario': Rain, erosion add up to disaster in slide-prone region

By The Seattle Times Staff

ARLINGTON — Hopes dimmed Sunday for finding survivors in the nearly one square mile of muck and debris left by a mudslide that killed at least eight people and demolished dozens of houses.

Officials confirmed eight dead during a community meeting Sunday night in Darrington. Just a few hours earlier, the death toll had stood at four.

Tod Gates, an incident commander, said that as he and other rescuers flew in a helicopter to the Darrington meeting, they spotted the four additional bodies. The dead were not identified Sunday night.

More than a dozen remained missing, but it was unclear just how many.

“We didn’t see or hear any signs of life out there today,” said Travis Hots, chief of Snohomish County Fire Districts 21 and 22, during a Sunday afternoon news conference.

Darkness and shifting debris forced rescuers Saturday night to abandon efforts to reach voices coming from a buried structure.

By Sunday, they heard no more voices, Hots said.

Casualties are likely to rise as the search continues through the wreckage that is all that remains of neighborhoods along the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River. In addition to destroying 30 or more homes, the slide buried a milelong stretch of Highway 530 under 20 feet or more of mud.

Gov. Jay Inslee warned of grim days ahead during a news conference at Arlington City Hall. “I have a sense we are going to have some hard news here,” he said.

The rain-soaked hillside that slid away Saturday morning was the same one that had partially collapsed in 2006. The area is about 16 miles east of Arlington.

With no positive news forthcoming, relatives of the missing crowded into the Darrington Community Center looking for answers.

Relatives handed photos of missing loved ones to rescue personnel in hopes they might turn up unconscious at a hospital.

Those reportedly missing ranged from Oso-area homeowners to repairmen on work assignments and a group of girls at a slumber party.

Ron Thompson, whose home was destroyed, stopped by the evacuation shelter at Post Middle School in Arlington to find out if his friends turned up alive. “We lost a lot of good kids. I don’t know what else to tell you. It hurts,” he said before driving away.

A 4-month-old baby and her grandmother were also among the missing.

The baby, Sanoah Huestis, lived with her grandparents, Christina and Seth Jefferds. Seth Jefferds, a volunteer firefighter, was not home at the time of the slide and arrived to find his house flattened and his wife and granddaughter missing, said his brother-in-law, Dale Petersen.

“He said it was just like a bulldozer ran over the house,’’ Petersen said.

Although the names of the people killed in the slide were not officially released, one is former Darrington librarian and School Board member Linda McPherson, 69, according to Pete Selvig, a member of the Darrington emergency-response team and a retired U.S. Forest Service employee.

McPherson’s husband, Gary “Mac” McPherson, was also injured. His condition was not immediately known.

The couple’s house and that of their niece and nephew next door were both destroyed, Selvig said. The younger couple were not at home, but their dog was trapped in the debris, he said.

Rescuers tried to get to the dog after hearing whimpering Saturday night, but had to give up because the mud and debris were moving, Selvig said.

McPherson was branch manager of the Darrington library and served for about 15 years on the School Board, said Selvig, who served with her.

He said her approach to the business and challenges of the small rural school district was professional and methodical. She was part of a Darrington contingent that lobbied the state Legislature for funding to rebuild the district’s three aging schools. “Her name is on the plaque on the new elementary,” Selvig said.

Seven people injured in the slide were being treated at area hospitals Sunday.

At Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, a 6-month-old baby boy and an 81-year-old man were in critical condition in the intensive-care unit. A 37-year-old man and a 58-year-old man were in serious condition. A 25-year-old woman was in satisfactory condition.

At Cascade Valley Hospital in Arlington, one woman was in satisfactory condition. Skagit Valley Hospital in Mount Vernon reported that a 68-year-old man was in stable condition.

Witnesses described a frantic scene when the slide hit Saturday morning.

Neighbors rushed to retrieve a mud-covered baby within moments, said an Arlington woman who was driving by when the catastrophe occurred.

“We thought it was a car accident,” said Sierra Sansaver, of Arlington, who said she was driving to Darrington to find the road was blocked by mud. “Then you realize there’s a house in the middle of the road.”

“We heard screaming from a house 100 yards from us. A whole bunch of men went in there and pulled out a 6-month-old baby,” Sansaver said. Firefighters also were arriving, she said.

“There was mud, household items everywhere, people screaming, crying, running into the rubbish.”

“Everybody was covered in mud. A lady next door who saw what happened, she was giving them blankets to hold the baby in. They got in a car, and left,” said Sansaver.

The infant at Harborview matched that scenario.

In Darrington, a search-and-rescue team of about 20 people was advised Sunday morning to mark dead bodies if they saw any and keep looking for survivors.

Some workers emerged from the meeting bleary-eyed and dispirited.

One volunteer firefighter who had stopped working around 11:30 p.m. Saturday night said many tragic stories have yet to be told. He watched one rescuer find his own front door, but nothing else — not his home, his wife or his child.

They’re in the “missing” category along with many it is feared will eventually be listed as dead.

“It’s much worse than everyone’s been saying,” said the firefighter, who did not want to be named.

“The slide is about a mile wide. Entire neighborhoods are just gone. When the slide hit the river, it was like a tsunami.”

By noon on Sunday, the dammedup Stillaguamish River was starting to break through a hole in the mile-wide mud wall near Oso, releasing some flow downstream. But officials said that was not a cause for alarm.

“It’s not flowing at a rate that causes concern. There is water coming through. They don’t feel it is going to be a catastrophic burst,” said Shari Ireton, spokeswoman for the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office.

Even if the water breaches the blockage, it is unlikely to cause major flooding downstream, said Brent Bower, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service.

The forecast for the area near Oso looks dry for most of Monday, said Johnny Burg, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Seattle. Rain could return Monday night and into Tuesday, but Burg said “we’re not forecasting anything heavy” — maybe a tenth of an inch. Through March 19, Arlington had recorded 7.14 inches of rain for the month — just a couple inches short of the wettest March on record. A flash flood warning remained in effect.

Inslee, who cut short a political trip to Montana to fly back to Washington state, thanked rescuers Sunday, and said he was awed by the destruction he witnessed after flying over the scene.

“The devastation is just unrelenting and awesome. There is no stick standing in the path of the slide,” Inslee said. “But there is another powerful force of nature, and that is empathy and compassion.”

Seattle Times staff reporters Jim Brunner, Lynn Thompson and Nancy Bartley reported from Seattle. Staff reporters Mike Carter, Mike Lindblom, Mike Baker and Christine Clarridge reported from Arlington. Alexa Vaughn reported from Darrington. Times news researcher Miyoko Wolf also contributed.

By Mike Baker, Ken Armstrong and Hal Bernton

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.

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 clearcut 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.

By Mike Baker and Justin Mayo

A forest clear-cut nine years ago appears to have strayed into a restricted area that could feed groundwater into the landslide zone that collapsed Saturday.

A Seattle Times analysis of government geographical data and maps suggests that logging company Grandy Lake Forest cut as much as 350 feet past a state boundary that was created because of landslide risks.

The state Department of Natural Resources is supposed to verify a timber company’s proposed cut on the ground and then reinspect the site after the harvest has been taken.

State Forester Aaron Everett reviewed records on the issue Wednesday afternoon and said it appears that a portion of the clear-cut’s footprint extended into the sensitive zone. He said his agency was trying to locate records to show whether it inspected the site after it was logged.

“I was surprised,” Everett said. He will investigate further before concluding whether Grandy Lake went beyond the borders.

Grandy Lake officials have not returned calls seeking comment.

In June 2004, landowner Grandy Lake proposed cutting 15 acres up to the edge of a plateau above the landslide area.

State officials rejected its application because some of the proposed logging fell within the restricted zone — what is called an “Area of Resource Sensitivity.”

Years before, the state had protected this area, which is directly above the landslide area, because scientists were concerned clear-cutting could feed more groundwater into the slope, increasing instability in an area with a history of mudslides. Mature trees can intercept or absorb much rainwater.

A clear-cut impact on groundwater can last for 16 to 27 years, according to a 1988 report by a University of Washington geologist.

Grandy Lake could have harvested in the sensitive area if it first monitored precipitation and groundwater for several years, but the company instead revised its application.

The company proposed leaving out that restricted area and instead cutting a pizza-shape wedge, about 7.5 acres, that abutted the sensitive zone. In August 2004, the state approved the scaled-back plan.

An aerial image from July 2005, however, shows the clear-cut as a larger slice, with its tip going well over the boundary and to the edge of Saturday’s deadly slide, according to state geographical data.

Everett said his agency is gathering records to review what happened and to verify the accuracy of the maps and boundaries. He also wants to send officials to the site of the cut, but the area is currently off-limits due to instability.

He said permitting and reviewing proposed timber harvests can be inexact. For example, Grandy Lake’s original proposal included a small map with a hand-drawn triangle showing the area it wanted to cut. When the company resubmitted its permit application, it used the original map but simply crossed out the portion that was to be left alone, so the new boundaries aren’t entirely clear.

State officials would typically take that map and put it into the state’s digital system, Everett said. An agency worker would visit the site of the proposed cut and make sure the boundaries were correct. Again, that process — typically relying on maps and aerial images instead of GPS coordinates — could be inexact. Landowners who fail to comply with the state’s permit can be fined, Everett said. He said he wants more information before the matter could be referred for enforcement.

Everett said he also wants to consult scientists to see whether the clear-cut could have contributed to the slide. He said trees may have done little to prevent such a deep-seated failure of the hill.

“It’s sort of like the idea that a set of toothpicks are going to hold back a train,” Everett said. 

A narrative of the Snohomish County mudslide based on Seattle Times interviews with survivors, rescuers and friends and family of the dead and missing; police- and fire-dispatch tapes; and photographs and videos taken by Times staff, rescuers and witnesses.

Michael Lincoln woke to banging and screams.

He and his wife had been sleeping in on a lazy Saturday morning at his house along state Highway 530. Now his son’s girlfriend, Amy Miles, was pounding on the bedroom door.

“There’s a flash flood!” she screamed. “Or something!”

Miles had packed her boyfriend’s lunch and had watched him drive off to work. She’d been on the porch, about to walk his parents’ yellow lab, Rocco, when she heard a tremendous rumbling and snapping. She looked up and saw Douglas firs falling and breaking and splashes of water shooting up through the woods. Mud and tree limbs raced up the long driveway toward the porch in waves.

“I actually thought it was the end of the world,” she says.

She ran and woke Lincoln, 50, who bolted outside in a T-shirt and sweatpants. He saw a river of wet earth crashing toward his home. He tugged on his gardening boots.

“The noise was awful,” he says. “It was the sound of tens of thousands of things hitting each other.”

He paced, unsure what he was seeing. Then it registered: mudslide.

“The direction it was coming from ... there’s nothing there. You can’t imagine the scope. Those trees must have come from almost a mile away.”

Miles feared her boyfriend, Quinten, might have been hit by whatever this was. She called — and he picked up on the first ring.

The river of sludge settled, not 20 feet from Lincoln’s house. Lincoln walked to the highway and sank to his waist. He looked in both directions. All he saw was destruction.

With a jolt, he thought of his neighbors, Cory and Julie. Their house was a pile of rubble.

He thought of his other neighbors, Linda and Mac. Their home had been pushed more than 100 feet and split in two.

Lincoln didn’t know what to do. He started pacing and shouting: “Hello? Is anybody there?” He noticed a stranger doing the same.

From all this wreckage they heard a voice. And they heard tapping.

Lincoln called 911.

Sierra Sansaver and her boyfriend bounced down Highway 530 from Arlington in his Dodge pickup. They stopped in tiny Trafton, where he grabbed a drink and a deli burrito. He was almost back to the truck when he spun around and wandered back inside for another packet of ranch dressing.

“Oh my god, can we just go?” she asked.

Back on the road minutes later they rounded a corner to find mud, tree trunks, downed power lines and parts of houses littering the roadway.

They’d missed the slide by two minutes.

Emergency vehicles arrived, and a man in a bucket truck cut electricity to the downed wires. Someone heard a scream near a crumpled blue house. Everyone got quiet, listening. Then Sansaver heard it, too — a high-pitched wail. Several men barreled into the muck.

“There’s a baby out here!” someone shouted.

State Trooper Rocky Oliphant raced in and snagged pieces of house — trusses, metal, roofing, plywood — to build a path back for the rescuers. A man came across — holding the baby.

Within minutes, a sense of horror crept into the voices of police and firefighters responding to the 911 calls.

Snohomish County would put two helicopters in the air. The Navy in Everett sent a third.

Rescuers launched piecemeal operations on the fringes of a massive and treacherous debris field. They worried about a shifting bog, in places more than 20 feet deep. They worried about the Stillaguamish River, dammed by the slide, backing up, rising — an inch and a half every seven minutes.

“That thing could break loose at any second,” the command post radioed.

Calls went out for more police and firefighters. Calls went out for a hydrologist and geologist. One call asked for “every available chaplain.”

Crews began to grasp how many victims there might be. The command post asked about the largest neighborhood just across the river from the hill. Snohawk 10, the first helicopter in the air, supplied the answer.

“We have confirmed debris from houses off of West Steelhead Drive,” the pilot radioed, dejection in his voice.

“If we can get more manpower to search the debris for possible victims, that would be great,” he said.

As the ground team moved in, someone radioed up to the chopper.

“Do you have any indication that there could be life down there?”

“Not at this time.”

Robin Youngblood had been sitting in her living room on Steelhead Drive with a friend from the Netherlands when she heard a cracking. Through the window she saw mud, 25 feet high, coming.

The wave crashed into the house and sent both women tumbling, the slurry caking their nostrils and mouths. Youngblood, 63, crawled onto a clothes dryer and what was left of her roof, floating in 3 feet of wet earth. Jetty Dooper sat on another appliance and part of a door. They screamed for someone to call 911, then waited, shivering.

Randy Fay, a volunteer helicopter-rescue technician with Snohomish County, scanned the landscape below, looking for signs of life. Whisking over the hummocks and ruins in Snohawk 10, he was numb. Nothing appeared intact: “It was like this moon landscape, with pickup sticks everywhere.”

He spied Youngblood and Dooper — they were waving — and lowered down to them. Youngblood’s home was in pieces, but she’d spotted one prized possession, a dirt-streaked painting of a Cherokee warrior. Fay loaded her onto a litter, then grabbed the painting and followed her up.

“That’s about all she’s got left.”

The chopper dropped Youngblood by the roadside and returned to the air.

Fay and the pilot spotted two men fighting through the mushy silt, trying to save a child. One man reached the boy, 4-year-old Jacob Spillers. But both man and child were stuck.

Fay realized the boy was about the age of his grandson. “If that was Eli, I’d do whatever I had to do,” he would later say.

While the helicopter hovered, Fay climbed down onto a giant muddy mound and threw a line. The man tied the rope to Jacob, and Fay hauled him in.

Growing up, Fay had traipsed through muddy Oklahoma river bottoms, losing pairs of boots as the earth sucked them off. This was 10 times worse.

When Jacob was yanked from the muck, his pants fell off. Fay hoisted him, cold and shivering, into the helicopter, its heater on full blast. Then Snohawk 10 flew Jacob to the roadside, where he was left in Youngblood’s care.

“I stripped him down, wrapped him in blankets, told him I was a grandmother and I would hug him until help arrived,” Youngblood said.

Jacob’s mother, Jonielle Spillers, was at work when the slide hit. Unable to get home, she called hospitals until she found Jacob. Missing or dead are Jacob’s father and three kids — Jovon, 13, Kaylee, 5, and Brooke, 2.

“I can hear him tapping underneath. And yelling at us,” Mike Lincoln told the 911 dispatcher.

Lincoln was the 10th caller to 911. At first, he couldn’t tell where the sounds were coming from. But then he knew: The yelling was coming from the house split in two. It was Gary “Mac” McPherson.

Mac was 81. He and Lincoln had chatted once or twice in the evening, when Lincoln walked his dog. Mac was married to Linda, a former school-board member and librarian.

The McPhersons had lived in their house for more than 40 years. Linda had grown up next door, in the other flattened house that now belonged to Linda’s nephew, Cory Kuntz, and his wife, Julie.

Lincoln had no idea where Cory and Julie were, or if they were OK.

When all became a roar that morning, Mac and Linda had been in their living room, Mac in a fleece bathrobe, in a mission-style chair, Linda with her bags packed for a trip to Houston to see their son. “He didn’t even get a chance to look over at my mom,” their daughter Kate says. “The last memory he had was thinking a tornado hit.”

Caked in mud, able to move only his right hand, Mac had clawed to daylight and waved a decorative spindle, busted from his chair, to catch someone’s eye.

Neighbors and passers-by from the highway searched for tools to free McPherson, and returned with chain saws and a crowbar. Lincoln yelled for an ax. Miles ran to get one from a woodpile and sank to her knees. “It just ate you,” she says of the mud.

The men started cutting through two-by-fours and the roof as emergency crews arrived. People could smell leaking propane. A firefighter shouted to the gathering crowd: “Nobody light a cigarette!”

Amy Miles snapped a photo. It was 11:35 a.m. — 51 minutes after the first 911 call.

Lincoln saw McPherson’s fingers and then his face, scratched and bloody. “We pulled him out of his chair and carried him down off the roof,” Lincoln says. “He was telling us about how he was a fighter and how he’s going to fight through this. Then he started crying and saying, ‘My wife!’ ”

Rescuers found Linda, limp, and carried her from the rubble. She was already dead. They laid her down and covered her up.

Near the McPhersons’ home, emergency workers spotted another body in the mud and debris. They recovered the body and laid it next to Linda’s.

For Lincoln, there was little left to do. Rescuers urged everyone back to their cars. Lincoln wandered toward the highway, spotting a few people he knew. They saw yet another body, outside a wrecked car. Lincoln asked his wife to bring a sheet. He stood there a moment, taking in his neighborhood, and then spied one more corpse, wrapped around a stump, clothes torn off.

By then, Lincoln had been going for hours. His gardening boots, now filled with mud, felt like 20-pound weights. The horror of the day was catching up.

“My knees were shaking, my hands were shaking,” he says.

An aid worker told Lincoln: “Get your family and just get out of here.”

Somewhere, out of sight, a man was screaming.

Darrington volunteer firefighter Jeffery McClelland had waded into the eastern edge of the monstrous slide, near C Post Road along Highway 530. He could tell where the screaming was coming from, but couldn’t see more than a few yards in a landscape that had been turned inside out.

The screaming man said his arm was “barely hanging on.”

McClelland keyed his radio mike: “I need swift-water gear out here. If I can get a partner, I can get to the patient. He basically has one arm amputated.

The gear came in the back of Aid 38, a Darrington fire-and-rescue truck driven by McClelland’s 57-year-old wife, Jan — another volunteer on the swift-water rescue team. Behind her came Shaylah Dobbins, a 37-year-old mother of three who had kissed her kids goodbye and raced down the hill from White Horse in her Range Rover after her pager went off.

The three suited up — heavy dry suit, safety harnesses, gloves, helmet — and grabbed rope, medical supplies and extrication tools. Jan McClelland took in the scene. Once, the Stillaguamish meandered through poplar and pine. Now it looked like someone had chewed the valley up and spit it out. Every tree was broken or splintered. Giant root-balls, once buried deep, poked into the air. Houses, barns and outbuildings were pancaked or just gone.

Dobbins and the McClellands, roped together, stepped into the muck, walking slowly, deliberately, sometimes falling in to their armpits. Jan worried that every next step would be a “bottomless hole.”

Where they couldn’t go around logs and debris, they pulled themselves up and over. But they couldn’t find a safe path through: The debris was too thick, the ground too unstable. They headed back toward C Post Road.

The man kept screaming.

The three climbed to the end of a wide, flooded meadow a little north of the slide path — and again, waded in. “Even when we got close, you couldn’t see him at first,” Dobbins said.

Finally they found him, sitting at the base of a shattered tree. The slide had carried him across the valley and up the slope on the other side. His left arm hung mangled, the biceps extruding from the skin. He was covered in mud and blood, and shaking. He appeared to be suffering from both shock and hypothermia.

They controlled the bleeding by binding his wound. Jan McClelland stripped off the top of her dry-suit and pulled off the fleece beneath. Dobbins took off her warm hoodie. The women wrapped the man in their clothing and an emergency blanket, and started figuring out how they were going to get him out of there.

They considered using a “Stokes” basket — a sort of wire-cage stretcher — and a rope-and-pulley system to get him across the flooded meadow. But they would need more rope and Jeff McClelland, seeing the victim’s ashen features, didn’t think the man would survive the trip.

Jeff McClelland radioed for help: “We’ve got a patient that we’re losing quickly. He’s critical.”

A helicopter was diverted to a nearby clearing, and the man was flown out.

Jan McClelland said the man had only one question: “What happened?”

On Saturday afternoon, Lynne Rodgers Miller was on the couch in her home in Ballard, reading the news on her cellphone. There was a landslide in Snohomish County. “Oh, no,” she thought. “Hazel’s gone again.”

Miller is a geologist. So is her husband, Dan. They met in a petrology lab, where rocks get studied under microscopes, because every rock tells a story.

She had to tell him the news.

They knew that slope as the Hazel slide. Dan had walked the slope, analyzed the slope, talked to the community about the slope. In his basement were six manila folders filled with maps and drawings and reports on the slope, including one he’d written in 1999 for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

He had broken that report into discrete sections, covering the slope’s history (“active for over half a century”); materials (“the sand is unconsolidated and exhibits no cohesion”); geomorphology (“four mechanisms of mass-movement”); topography (“river erosion into slope toes”); and future activity (“potential for a large catastrophic failure”).

Inside those six folders were records of slides before — 1949, 1951, 1967, 1988, 2006 — but those were just the big ones, the “debris avalanches.” Some had dammed the Stillaguamish, making it divert, pushing it south. Between avalanches, the hillside oozed. Miller’s folders also included records of failed attempts to control the hillside. In a report to the state in the early 1950s, engineers suggested rerouting the river. But a report from the ’60s said the state missed its chance. The land slotted for the new channel had been platted and the lots sold for summer-cabin sites.

Miller had grown up in Nebraska, not known for big hills. But after getting a bachelor’s in physics he’d gone off to Nepal, to the Himalayas, where he served in the Peace Corps for three years. There he helped build drinking-water systems, only to see landslides destroy all his work. So landslides became a calling; he went on to get a Ph.D. and to co-found a nonprofit, Earth Systems Institute, devoted to landscape dynamics.

When Lynne found Dan and told him the news, he knew it was Hazel, too. It had to be. If only they had listened.

He had studied the slope not only for the federal government, but also for the state Department of Ecology and for a timber company wanting to log on the hill’s plateau. He believed logging could be done above, but only with care and detailed analysis. As for the Stillaguamish below, Miller knew it would pose a threat as long as it continued to erode the hill’s base.

In 2006 Miller had returned to Hazel, which had collapsed again, and diverted the river again, and formed another toe that would be eroded again. But now the river and toe were closer to the homes on Steelhead Drive. He could hardly believe what he saw next: More homes were being built.

He watched them going up while surveying the latest instance of the hill coming down. After all he’d done to document the slope’s instability, the county was still issuing building permits for homes across the river.

Later that year Miller was asked by a community group to talk about the slope. He showed up at a firehouse with a PowerPoint presentation, the first panel titled: “The Hazel Landslide: Déjà vu all over again.”

His 16th slide illustrated what might happen in the future: “movement of a vast volume of material.”

Late Saturday afternoon, commanders decided the ground was too dangerous, especially for rescuers downhill from the pooling water.

Around 4 p.m. an incident commander on the Arlington side of the slide announced a decision “to pull the plug at this time. Those rescue units that are still in, need to withdraw.”

Rescuers were told to go after only those who could be reached by helicopter.

As some rescue workers started to walk out, they heard cries from beneath the muck.

“I need some permission to go ahead and save some of these people real quick so we can get out,” a search-team leader radioed.

“That’s a negative. Nobody is going in there anymore,” the command post responded.

The search team leader said his people were going anyway.

Thomas Durnell was home when the slide hit and is missing. His wife, Deb, was working, and is safe.

Thom and Marcy Satterlee didn’t make it out. Nor did their 19-year-old granddaughter, Delaney Webb, who was visiting. Nor did Webb’s fiancé, who was visiting, too. “We’ve lost four,” says Nichole Webb Rivera, the Satterlees’ daughter and Webb’s mother.

Ron and Gail Thompson left eight minutes before the slide hit, for a trip to Costco.

Irvin and Judith Wood owned a home in the neighborhood as a weekend getaway. Sometimes they’d bring the grandkids. On this weekend, they were away.

Amanda Lennick, an Everett nurse, had just moved into her Steelhead Drive home with its cathedral ceiling and knotty-pine cabinets. Three workers — a plumber, an electrician and a satellite-TV technician — were to arrive that morning. All are missing or dead.

Kristi Everett, a real-estate agent, helped Lennick find the house. The two became friends. “I’m never selling another house there again,” Everett says. “I don’t know why, after the [2006] slide, the Army Corps of Engineers didn’t condemn all the houses.”

By Sunday, the disaster’s enormity was coming into focus. Whole streets were buried under mud that in places reached 30 feet. A volunteer firefighter told of a rescuer who found his own front door, but not his home, wife or child.

A cluster of mud-splattered men, their frustration boiling over, mounted wildcat searches for friends, ignoring barricades. Police even threatened to arrest one of them, Forrest Thompson.

“Right off the bat they should have had every one of the loggers here in there,” Thompson, 18, would tell a reporter. “Climbing across logs and mud all day is what I do for a living.”

Monday morning, John Pennington, head of the county’s Department of Emergency Management, answered reporters’ questions in Arlington, about 16 miles west of the mudslide.

“Before this slide was there any warning that it was about to happen?”

“No, no, this was a completely unforeseen slide,” Pennington said. He fought back a cough. “This came out of nowhere. No warning.”

“A homeowner last night told me he was assured by authorities in ’06 that it was safe. Comment?”

“Well, I heard the same thing. That area was mitigated very heavily. ... It was considered very safe.”

Monday afternoon, Dan Miller received a call from a Seattle Times reporter, asking about Miller’s 1999 report. They met in Miller’s office — on the top floor of the Trinity United Methodist Church in Ballard — and went through his research.

The paper posted a story that night about Miller’s warnings. Within minutes Miller’s phone began to ring. Tuesday morning camera crews affiliated with ABC, CBS and NBC showed up at the church. “It was pretty crowded in there,” Lynne Rodgers Miller says.

It was too late, but now everyone wanted to hear what he had to say.

In the days to come Miller would talk to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and The Associated Press. He’d go on air with the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Al-Jazeera America and Radio New Zealand. He’d be interviewed by Anderson Cooper, Greta Van Susteren and Rachel Maddow. Even The Weather Channel called.

Miller revisited his slide presentation from 2006, then emailed a reporter: “Clearly, we need to find ways to better communicate this type of information to government planners and regulators, and to the public, and to do so in ways that are clear and understandable.”

A few days after the slide, Miller received a call from someone who had been at his community presentation in 2006. The caller recounted how a man had stood in the back of the room and told Miller: “You’re trying to take our land.”

Mike Lincoln had no reference point. He’d never been in the military, never seen death like this.

“Traumatizing is not really the right word. It was haunting,” he says. “I keep seeing those people and thinking, ‘What had they experienced? Did they see it coming?’”

After being advised to get out, Lincoln and his family had grabbed clothes and medication and driven the long way around to Arlington, where they checked into a hotel.

On Monday, Lincoln returned to his job at a food-service-company warehouse. “In my mind, I needed to stick to normalcy,” he says. After a few days, he realized he needed to be with his wife and son. They needed to be together. He took time off.

In the aftermath, there was good news with the bad. Lincoln learned that the Kuntzes, Cory and Julie, had left 15 minutes before the slide to attend their son’s baseball game in Tacoma. The Kuntzes learned that Lincoln had helped save their uncle.

Lincoln can’t shake the what-ifs, wondering about the misfortune of drivers who happened to be passing through and about the neighbors he’ll never get to know.

“I have been waking up in the middle of the night,” he says. “I know life goes on, but I just keep playing it over and over and over.”

This story was reported by Ken Armstrong, Mike Baker, Gene Balk, Nancy Bartley, Michael J. Berens, Hal Bernton, Jack Broom, Jim Brunner, Mike Carter, Christine Clarridge, Paige Cornwell, Sandi Doughton, Coral Garnick, Dominic Gates, Angel Gonzalez, Sara Jean Green, John Higgins, Erik Lacitis, Mike Lindblom, Amy Martinez, Justin Mayo, Carol Ostrom, Brian M. Rosenthal, Jennifer Sullivan, Lynn Thompson, Janet I. Tu, Lornet Turnbull, Alexa Vaughn, Craig Welch, Miyoko Wolf and Bob Young. It was written by Armstrong, Carter and Welch.

This story is based on Seattle Times interviews with survivors, rescuers and friends and family of the dead and missing. It also draws on a review of 16 hours of police- and fire-dispatch tapes and photographs and videos taken by Times staff, rescuers and witnesses. Documents relied upon include: police reports; land-use records; state records of timber harvests; State Patrol Trooper Rocky Oliphant’s notes about this event; and geological reports and memos about the Hazel slope from 1952, 1961, 1969, 1988, 1999 and 2006, most filed with state or federal agencies.