re: #359 Sionainn

I thought I read that the homes there were 100 years old.

Here is a report on all that from the Seattle Times published last evening.

Risk of slide ‘unforeseen’? Warnings go back decades

TIMES WATCHDOG: While a Snohomish County official said the area hit by the mudslide “was considered very safe,” the hillside’s history of slides dates back more than 60 years. One expert says he was shocked when homebuilding was permitted after a big 2006 slide.

Since the 1950s, geological reports on the hill that buckled during the weekend in Snohomish County have included pessimistic analyses and the occasional dire prediction. But no language seems more prescient than what appears in a 1999 report filed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, warning of “the potential for a large catastrophic failure.”

That report was written by Daniel J. Miller and his wife, Lynne Rodgers Miller. When she saw the news of the mudslide Saturday, she knew right away where the land had given way. Her husband knew, too.

“We’ve known it would happen at some point,” he told The Seattle Times on Monday. “We just didn’t know when.”

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“Considered very safe”

His perspective stands in contrast to what John Pennington, head of Snohomish County’s Department of Emergency Management, said at a news conference Monday. “It was considered very safe,” Pennington said. “This was a completely unforeseen slide. This came out of nowhere.”

The 2006 slide took place in winter, on Jan. 25. Three days later, as the new channel cut the land, “residents and agency staff reported the eerie sound of trees constantly snapping as the river pushed them over,” wrote the Stillaguamish Tribe’s Natural Resource Department on its website. But the sound of construction competed with the sound of snapping trees.

“They didn’t even stop pounding nails,” said Tracy Drury, an environmental engineer and applied geomorphologist who assessed the area with Miller soon after the landslide. “We were surprised.”

At least five homes were built in 2006 on Steelhead Drive, according to Snohomish County records. The houses were granted “flood hazard permits” that required them to be jacked up 1 to 2 feet above “base flood elevation,” according to county building-permit records. Another home was built in the neighborhood in 2009.

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So, it does appear there was some newer construction allowed even after the warnings. This story is going to gain some momentum once they get past trying to find the missing.