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 in the Oso landslide.
“I need to get them out of here,” she said. “They cannot snap out of it. It’s like it happened yesterday, every day, when they drive by the school that the kids would have gone to.” The Oso landslide scar is seen near a sign at the memorial site on Saturday, Feb. 17, 2024, in Oso, Washington. , destabilizing soil. Predicting slides remains difficult, though some research projects have helped establish under what conditions certain types might occur.Areas that have not burned have also suffered, such as the mountainous temperate rainforest of southeast Alaska, which has seen three deadly landslides on saturated slopes since 2015.
The tsunami of sodden earth and pulverized timber slammed into Steelhead Haven, a subdivision of 35 homes. The highway running alongside was buried 20 feet deep.on the slope, including massive prehistoric slides. One in 2006 dammed the river, and before that, technical reports had warned about a potential “large catastrophic failure” and “significant risk to human lives and private property.” OfficialsBut even those reports did not suggest anything could happen on the order of what did occur.
Raffo’s older brother, Dayn Brunner, was a tribal police officer at the time. His mother called him that day and said: “You’re her brother. You need to go find her.” He and his teenage sons went past police barricades and spent five days digging through the muck. When searchers finally found Raffo’s car, they called Brunner over to lift her body out. Her hands were still on the wheel. The speedometer read 60 mph.
“We could be standing here and talking about that they never recovered my one nephew, who is one of the last ones” to be found, Pszonka said. “To those firefighters and search and rescue people and rescue dogs and all the people that promised that they would stay until every person was found, I will be forever grateful.”