Excluding landslides caused by volcanic eruptions, earthquakes or dam collapses, the Oso slide is the deadliest single landslide event in United States history.
See the slideshow of the rescue efforts below:
I was contracting at the time in Western Washington state when on a particular Saturday morning, a mountain near where we were living fell down.
We had left Texas upon after working on FEMA houses after hurricane Ike and landed in Western Washington state. Upon our arrival to Washington, we were looking around for a place to lease for the period of time we were to be there.
We found a few places in Darrington, Steelhead Haven in Oso, and another place just out of Trafton up Jim Creek Road. We settled on the Jim Creek Road place because of it’s proximity to Arlington and the work I was doing.
We had enrolled our son in the elementary school in Arlington. We drove him because though the bus ran to Oso, it didn’t run beyond Trafton up Jim Creek Road.
Both I and my wife worked, and sometimes her schedule conflicted with her picking our son up from school. Since I could do pretty much what I wanted with my schedule, I opted to pick our son up from school most of the time. There were however, those times when I would be working over in Bremerton, and I would have to deal with Seattle/Tacoma traffic — there were times when I would sit for two hours during a ten mile drive.
I was sort of complaining about the traffic one day when we were all waiting for class to get out at our son’s school when Katie Ruthven offered to pick our son up along with her son (both boys were in the same class) and look after him at their house on Steelhead Drive until either me or my wife could pick him up after work. I thought that would be great and offered to pay her and her husband Shane for the effort. She didn’t want payment however and told me to call them if I wanted our son picked up.
Long story short, we never had Katie look after our son after school. We just worked it all out so our son didn’t need for them to pick him up.
I’m sure that our son would have had a real blast if he ever went out to the Ruthven place, because he was already good buddies with their son Hunter.
It was a very rainy Friday afternoon when we were standing under cover at the school waiting for the kids to be released. I remember Katie telling Wyatt (Katie’s 4 year old son) to pick up Hunters jacket that was left on the playground that day, and her wringing it out. Never really ever thought about it all until Saturday morning when there were reports of a house sitting in the middle of SR530 at Oso.
It was a brilliantly sunny Saturday morning when we learned that Steelhead Haven was totally wiped of the planet.
The mountain behind Steelhead Haven had totally collapsed.
We lost our friends on that morning. — Mudslide Claimed Three Generations of One Family
Steelhead Haven was a beautiful place and the house we might have leased there was only 4 years old — but I had to be practical with regard to work and select a location that would cut travel time down and put us closer to our son’s school.
—
The March 2014 landslide engulfed 49 homes and other structures in an unincorporated neighborhood known as “Steelhead Haven” on the south side of the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River, approximately 4 miles east of Oso, Washington. It also dammed the river, causing extensive flooding upstream as well as blocking State Route 530, the main route to the town of Darrington (population 1,347), 16 miles east of Oso.
The natural rock and mineral formation (referred to by geologists as a “geological feature”) with the most recent activity in the area of Oso is known as the Hazel Landslide; the most recent landslide event was referred to in the media as “the Oso mudslide.”
