4월 1일, Hopes of mudslide survival fade

[NZ여성회]

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11228871

Hopes of mudslide survival fade

A mountainside community in Washington state is waiting in anguish as authorities working to identify remains in a huge mudslide warned they were unlikely to find anyone alive nearly a week after the disaster.

One local, Leslie Zylstra, said everybody in the town knew someone who had died, and the village was coming to grips with the fact many would never turn up.

"The people know there's no way anybody could have survived," said Zylstra. "They just want to have their loved ones, to bury their loved ones."

Authorities delayed an announcement that they said would substantially raise the death toll to allow the county medical examiner's office to continue with identification efforts.

They have acknowledged the deaths of at least 25 people with 17 bodies recovered. The possibility that dozens more people could be in the debris has the potential to place tiny Oso, with a total population of about 180, among the worst tragedies in Washington state history.

Reports of more bodies being found have trickled in from relatives and workers at the scene.

Searchers are working from a list of 90 missing people, which equates to about half of the population of Oso, a North Cascades foothills community northeast of Seattle.

That list has not been made public, but officials say it includes not just residents who may have been in their homes but others thought to have been in the area or travelling the highway when the slide struck.

Authorities have all but eliminated the possibility that some people on the list may have been out of the area and simply had not checked in. And they warned the chances of finding anyone alive amid the tonnes of silt and mud was slim. The difficult recovery job has exhausted searchers and is complicated by the sheer magnitude of the devastation from last Saturday's slide. Tonnes of earth and ambulance-sized boulders of clay smashed everything in their path, leaving unrecognisable remnants in their wake.

Mary Schoenfeldt, a disaster traumatologist who has been providing counselling services at schools and for public employees and volunteers, said townspeople were increasingly frustrated by the lack of information from authorities. That was normal for the current phase of the disaster, as was the physical toll taken by not having eaten or slept normally in days, she said.

The deadliest landslides in US history include one that killed 500 people when a dam in San Francisquito, California, collapsed in 1928, causing an abutment to give way, the US Geological Survey says. Storms have triggered other catastrophic slides, including one that killed 150 people in Virginia in the wake of Hurricane Camille in 1969.

Crews in Oso that had worked for days in the rain and mud were getting some relief as replacements arrived.