DARRINGTON, Wash. — The landslide on March 22 in the high slope above the community of Oso mowed down a forest. Trees great and small, splintered and tumbling, became part of the slide’s signature, in killing 30 people and leaving 13 others still missing.
But by dint of geography, economics and history here in the North Cascades, a community of loggers and foresters, deeply schooled in clearing timber under dangerous conditions, lived within running distance of the disaster.
Many ran right in.
Those scores of volunteers — some well organized, others almost guerrilla-like in the way they moved in to search for victims as local and federal managers were asserting control — changed the nature of the response to the landslide, even as it changed them.
Families bonded, with generations joining the search for neighbors and friends. Last Sunday, the DeYoung family sent six people into the mud to dig, with a seventh staying back at the Darrington fire station, about 10 miles from the debris field, giving free therapeutic massages to stressed and exhausted responders.
Log Jams Create Problems for Searchers
Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington and Lt. Richard Burke of the Bellevue Fire Department discussed the search in Oso, Wash., and explained how log jams have delayed the effort.
Friendships formed as volunteers from far away were folded into the mix. In the parking lot of the IGA Supermarket here the week after the landslide, A former Marine named Doug Cochran spotted two men whom he knew in an instant to be Marines as well, if only by their haircuts and bearing. The two — Joshua Hubel, who had worked with search dogs in the corps, and his friend Justin Thurber — had driven all night from their homes near Portland, Ore., to help, and had no place to stay.
“All Marines are brothers,” Mr. Cochran, 32, said Wednesday night in an interview in his house, explaining the decision that he and his wife, Amanda, made to take the men in. The next morning, with a local veteran added in, they formed a four-man squad and went out to search.
Oso’s landslide was a geological event. A rain-saturated slope gave way just after 10:30 a.m. that Saturday, shattering many families and destroying 49 homes in seconds, as the equivalent mass of three Hoover Dams of earth came crashing down. But beyond the death toll and the physical destruction, which includes a stretch of State Route 530 scoured to virgin soil in places and buried, the disaster was a transformative experience for the surrounding communities, and especially the woodsmen and women who waded in to help.
“Things will never be the same for the community, for all of us,” said Bob DeYoung, 48, a logging contractor who has worked 10 days straight on the pile, as the square-mile debris field is called, often rising at 4:30 or 5 a.m. and returning for dinner at 9 p.m., said his wife, Julie.
But even then, said Mr. DeYoung — 6 feet 8 inches tall and barrel-chested, nicknamed Shrek by his wife — eats only about half what he used to. Not much appetite after seeing what you see out there, he said Wednesday night as he took off his work boots in the garage.
Some loggers talk about tensions between them and federal disaster officials in the debris field over goals and management, especially in the early days when passions and hope for finding survivors ran high and any delay, even for safety, seemed unacceptable.
But gradually, both sides said, a growing respect emerged for the different areas of expertise.
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The Federal Emergency Management Agency, working with local and state managers, developed a three-dimensional grid system for searching the hundreds of acres of torn-up earth, and a protocol for sorting personal effects to help pinpoint where a house or a victim might have been. The loggers, bringing in their own heavy equipment for cutting and lifting logs, showed skills that were matched only by their zeal and determination.
“FEMA has done a great job on directing us where their experts say the remains will be,” Mr. DeYoung said. “But these logging guys in this valley are the reasons why anything is happening, why any of these recoveries are happening.”
John Bentley, a FEMA urban search and rescue team specialist from Maryland, said the combination of specific skills so important after a woodland disaster like Oso, and the local interconnection of rural families who mostly knew one another, set this event apart.
“This tragedy is more personal,” he said. “This is their mountain, their community, and they know it better than anyone else.”
Cory DeYoung, 28, Mr. DeYoung’s son, lives about 45 minutes from the landslide with his own family. But the sense of a home ground endangered drew him and his wife, Krystal, back to dig last Sunday.
“There’s a duty,” he said.
Mr. Cochran, 32, was an infantryman in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he said, and now works as a forester. The violence he saw in war, he said, did not prepare him for the aftermath of the violent slide. He said he was struck particularly by the glimpses of life in the moments before everything was lost.
On one day, for example, he worked for three hours with a crew trying to cut into a vehicle that had been hurled into the trees and smashed. The team members, he said, worked with dread, expecting that human remains would be found inside. Instead, all they found were bags of crushed fresh groceries. The story drawn from the evidence was immediately, horrifyingly clear.
“She must have just climbed out of the car, with no time to have brought things in the house when it struck,” Mr. Cochran said. To his knowledge, the body has not been recovered.
For the DeYoungs, even decontamination — a crucial step in a debris field strewn with smashed septic tanks, car engines and household chemicals — became a family affair. After its workday last Sunday, the six-member team returned to Bob and Julie DeYoung’s house here in Darrington, under the shadow of Whitehorse Mountain, and carefully cleaned one another off with a hose in the front yard.
“It was very bonding,” Ms. DeYoung said later, describing that day.
The two Marines from Oregon, meanwhile, said they planned to return.
Mr. Thurber, 23, fresh out of the corps last fall — and footloose, he said, after a recent divorce — was so taken with the people he met and the gorgeous, steeply wooded Cascade landscape that he said he would consider a permanent move if he could find a job.
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