Friday marks 10 years since the side of a mountain collapsed, raced across a river and buried an entire neighborhood in rural Washington state, killing 43 people in the nation’s worst landslide disaster.
NationalJessica Pszonka hugs Dayn Brunner after they spoke during an interview while visiting the memorial for Oso landslide on Saturday, Feb. 17, 2024, in Oso, Wash. Dayn Brunner lost his sister Summer Raffo in the slide. Jessica Pszonka lost her sister Katie, two nephews, and three other family members. in U.S. history, Jessica Pzsonka made a promise -– to herself, to her bereft parents and to her late sister, who was buried along with two young sons, her husband and in-laws.
The trauma that engulfed Oso, a rural community of a couple hundred residents, on March 22, 2014, was a national wake-up call about the dangers of landslides. Washington state began hiring more staff and conducting more mapping to get a better handle on the risk, and it tightened guidelines on logging landslide-prone slopes amid concerns that clearcutting near the top of the scar might have helped cause the disaster.
None more so than Oso. It was 10:37 on a sunny Saturday morning following weeks of heavy rain when the hillside gave way in a scraping, crashing roar — some residents thought it was the Navy jets that often fly overhead. Some 19 million tons of sand and ancient glacial deposits — enough to cover 700 football fields 10 feet deep — raced across the river at an average speed of 40 mph , hydroplaning on the saturated valley floor “kind of like an air hockey table,” Collins said.
Summer Raffo, 36, was driving on State Route 530 on her way to shoe a horse for a client. Seconds earlier or later, she would have been fine. Instead, the slide buried her, ripping the roof off her blue Subaru.
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