by GENE JOHNSON and BECKY BOHRER | Associated PressPeople visit the site of the Oso landslide on Saturday, Feb. 17, 2024, in Oso, Wash. 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.
“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.” Nevertheless, landslides are likely to afflict more and more people as climate change intensifies storms and wildfires, destabilizing soil. Predicting slides remains difficult, though some research projects have helped establish under what conditions certain types might occur.
Landslides occur throughout the U.S., including in the Southeast after hurricanes. But Brian Collins, a research civil engineer with the U.S. Geological Survey who helped study the Oso slide, noted that in the “steeper terrain of the Western U.S. and Alaska, they do tend to be and — as we’re seeing — there have been ... certainly a number of devastating landslides in the past 10 years.”
But even those reports did not suggest anything could happen on the order of what did occur. Residents said they had no idea of the danger; homes continued being built even after the 2006 slide. Washington state and the company that logged above the slope paid more than $70 million to settle lawsuits by the 2014 slide's victims and their families.
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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