(The Slide)
E live near Seattle, on
Bainbridge Island, which is roughly the size of Manhattan but has a population
of only 19,000. As in most small communities, news travels rapidly by word of
mouth. We heard about the mudslide about four hours after it happened, on
Sunday, January 19, 1997. Our friend Dave told us about it late that morning,
as he scuffed his muddy shoes on the mat inside our front door, waiting to pick
up his daughter from a sleepover at our house. It was raining -- not hard, but
steadily. Almost twenty-six inches of precipitation had fallen since the
beginning of the rainy season, in October -- 40 percent above normal -- and the
ground had been slipping all around the Puget Sound area for weeks.
Dave said that the slide had demolished a house in Rolling Bay, a picturesque
old neighborhood on the east side of the island, with sweeping views across the
sound to the dark glitter of Seattle and the serrated backdrop of the Cascade
Mountains. The house was one of about twenty squeezed onto a sliver of beach
beneath a high cliff that parallels the Rolling Bay shore. It was owned by a
couple who had been remodeling it while they lived in the basement with their
children. Their living quarters were buried now, and rescuers were digging
through tons of mud to find the family. It didn't look good, Dave said.
After he left, I yelled upstairs to our seventeen-year-old daughter, Anna. "Did
you hear about that? A big mudslide over on Rolling Bay."
"Rolling Bay? That's where I was baby-sitting last night." Anna had come home
around midnight and told me how nervous the mother had been about leaving her
children -- a three-month-old baby and his two-year-old brother -- with a sitter.
Now, for the first time, I realized that we had not bothered to ask Anna where
she had been. "Was the house on the water?" I asked.
"Yeah."
A tremor of alarm prickled the back of my neck. "Who were you baby-sitting
for?"
"Mr. Herren -- you know, the biology teacher." Herren taught advanced-placement
classes at the high school, where his exuberant teaching style, good looks, and
long honey-colored hair made him a standout.
"Were they sleeping in the basement?"
"Well, yeah. But it's not really a basement. They're just on the bottom
floor."
That prickle again. I thought of my daughter giving the baby his bottle,
hoisting the sturdy two-year-old onto her hip. They had watched the video Babe
together just hours ago. I thought of cold gray mud smothering them all.
Anna went upstairs to call her friends, to find out if anyone knew anything. No
one did. The phone rang once, and she had a brief conversation. Then her father
and I heard her feet on the stairs. She took them slowly, one step at a time.
Someone had heard something on the TV news, Anna said. Step, step. Her
voice was matter-of-fact. They weren't releasing names, but they knew the ages
of the children in the house. Step. Step. Anna stood at the bottom of
the stairs, her expression strangely unreadable. "They were two years old and
three months old," she said, and her words dissolved abruptly in a hard sob.
T was still raining when I got to Rolling Bay Walk that afternoon. The sky
was a flat, dead gray -- the same color as the water, and the beach, and the mud
surrounding what was left of the Herren house. A portion of the top floor lay
on its side, the windows framed in raw plywood and the roof lapped by the
incoming tide. An orange excavating machine reached over mounds of weeping
earth and shattered timbers, its segmented arm gingerly scooping up debris in
the search for survivors. Emergency workers in raincoats and hard hats
clambered around, but it was impossible to tell what they were doing -- or what
they could do. There was no way to know what the three-story house had looked
like. Save for the empty shell of the toppled roof, it was gone.
| Bainbridge Island, Washington: slide scar, and the remains of the Herren house on Rolling Bay Walk, January, 1997. (Photograph by Teresa Tamura, The Seattle Times.)
|
Despite the heavy equipment and a TV helicopter that hovered offshore, the
scene seemed peculiarly quiet. The search crews had already found the body of
Dwight Herren; when I saw a woman leading her search dog back to her van, I
knew there was no hope for the others. Word soon passed among the bystanders
that the rescuers were bringing out the body of Herren's wife, Jennifer
Cantrell-Herren. A man standing next to me began to silently cry. The tiny
forms of the two-year-old, Skyler, and the baby, Cooper, were recovered next.
All had been sleeping in the same bedroom on the ground floor when the
tremendous force of the mudslide crushed the house on top of them, killing them
instantly.
--> to Description of Slide Event
Farther up the beach the street was blocked by a recent slide, a small one that
had not yet been shoveled away. Next to the roadblock a vacant house bore a
notice that it was unsafe for occupation. Several such notices had been posted
the previous year after a slide had destroyed another house. Why did people
persist in living here, when the proof of disaster was all around them?
As darkness fell on Rolling Bay Walk, neighbors called for the Herrens' big
Labrador, Henry. The dog didn't turn up, but other reminders of the family did.
In the days that followed, detritus washed up on the beach -- ruined clothing,
remnants of electronic equipment, shattered kitchen utensils. Tiny disposable
diapers were half buried in the sand. A little parade of rusting Tonka trucks
rested nearby. People put some of the items on top of a concrete bulkhead, out
of reach of the tides. "For the father," a neighbor said, meaning Dwight
Herren's despairing father, Vern, who walked the beach daily, trying to salvage
what he could. A week after the slide I found a pair of broken binoculars, a
shattered tape cassette, a packet of allergy medicine. I added them to the
bleak collection. Nothing was left of this family's life but pieces of
worthless trash.
The three-story house on the beach had been Dwight Herren's dream; he was
building it with his own hands and the help of family members, who pitched in
on weekends. He and his two brothers had grown up on a stony beach on the west
side of the island, in the lee of a forested cliff much like the one at Rolling
Bay, and Dwight wanted the same for his own sons. "He had an attraction to the
sea, to the water," his father, an avid sailor, told me. "I have it too."
After Dwight received a master's degree from Cornell, he got a job as a marine
biologist for the State of Washington, diving in water so cold that he wore two
wet suits, mapping beds of geoduck clams and sea cucumbers. It was dangerous
work, but he was careful. He believed utterly in himself, and that confidence
was contagious. When Dwight and Jennifer bought the beach house, their fathers
had voiced doubts. "We both advised them not to build there; it didn't look
good to us," Vern Herren said. "But Dwight said those houses had been there for
sixty or seventy years and nothing had ever happened."
A neighbor was watching when Henry was finally found. A crane unearthed the
dog's corpse while clearing away the last remains of the house. "He was right
under the house, in the place where he used to sleep," the man said. He spoke
softly, his voice blurred with sadness, and he had to clear his throat.
Once the crane finished its dreary work, the scene looked as if no house had
ever stood there, no dog had ever bounded to the front door, no children had
been rocked to sleep within the walls. There was just another gap in the
tattered bulwark of houses along Rolling Bay Walk, their backs to the
treacherous cliff and their trusting faces fixed on the heedless sea.
Hazard Zones
ANDSLIDES are perhaps the most widespread geologic hazard, and,
since they are a function of gravity, an intractable one. They play an
essential role in the synchrony by which the uplifting continents are
continually worn down, their sediments swept away and deposited somewhere else
to start anew. They made their first known appearance in written history in
1767 B.C., when earthquake-triggered slides in China dammed the Yi and Lo
Rivers. Peruvians have been well acquainted with terrible landslides for
thousands of years, and have words to distinguish different kinds of them:
huaico is a mudslide containing large and small rocks, llapana a smooth
mudflow. Entire villages are easily lost to avalanches in the Andes -- 18,000
people were killed in a single slide in 1970, and a devastating series of
mudflows claimed more than 20,000 victims in Colombia in 1985. The kind of
slide that killed the Herrens is known to geologists as a debris flow -- a rapid
collapse of the surface that is characteristic of slope failures in many parts
of the world.
| Tracks north of Seattle where, in January of 1997, mud swept a freight train into Puget Sound. (Photograph by Mike Siegel, The Seattle Times.)
|
Despite growing scientific knowledge about where and why landslides occur, the
threat they pose continues to increase, for reasons familiar to students of
ecological hazards: increasing development in vulnerable terrain, global
climate changes that exacerbate severe weather, and deforestation. The
financial costs incurred by slides run into the billions of dollars annually in
countries including the United States, Italy, India, and Japan. Poorer
countries such as Nepal and Indonesia, with less development at stake, suffer
great losses in human lives and productivity. Landslide casualties are usually
lumped together with those of more-publicized natural phenomena: most of the
victims of last year's earthquakes in Afghanistan, for instance, were killed
when their homes were crushed by the avalanches of debris that followed the
quake and its aftershocks. Similarly, mudslides were responsible for much of
the death and destruction wrought by Hurricane Mitch in Central America this
past November.
| A month later, the track repaired. (Photograph by Ed Harp, USGS.)
|
The Japanese spend more than $4 billion annually in attempts to control debris
flows and to respond to the disasters they cause. In a country that idealizes
the harmony of nature, the scenic river systems near urban areas are trussed
and choked by countless sabo dams, which trap mud and rocks sliding down
from the mountains. An American version of these dams is found in southern
California, where Los Angeles County maintains a system of massive "flood
control" breastworks to protect towns like Pasadena and Glendale -- not from
rising water but from the boulder-laden debris flows that can rumble out of the
canyons of the San Gabriel Mountains after a hard rain.
Ground failures of various sorts occur in every state; according to the
National Research Council, they annually cause more deaths (twenty-five to
fifty) and greater economic loss (roughly estimated at $1.5 billion) than all
other natural hazards combined. Yet they get little public attention. Because
there is no nationwide system for reporting landslides, hard statistics are
difficult to come by: the last inventory of landslide hazards was completed in
the 1980s by a geologist working for the U.S. Geological Survey who toured all
fifty states (most of them in his own van) -- a 70,000-mile survey that took him
three years.
Though the American West Coast is one of the most slide-prone regions in the
world, other natural disasters there steal the headlines -- earthquakes,
volcanoes, floods, wildfires. Debris flows are widely seen as cosmological
misfires, freaks of nature, and as a result people tend to underestimate the
risks they pose. Such misperceptions contribute to the general neglect of
landslide studies by research entities including the USGS, which in recent
years has been distracted by personnel cutbacks and congressional threats to
eliminate the agency. "The USGS competes with the Forest Service as the most
demoralized federal resource agency," says Bill Dietrich, a professor of
geology at the University of California at Berkeley. "It came under attack from
various political points of view -- it was no longer seen as so
essential." Meanwhile, the agency has struggled -- unsuccessfully, its critics
say -- to mount a comprehensive landslide-hazards program. "I don't think it's
for lack of trying," Dietrich says. "It's for lack of getting people's
attention."That struggle is reflected in the staffing of the USGS landslide
group, which numbers only fifteen employees. Its annual budget of $2.4 million
is dwarfed by the $49 million earthquake program, which has a staff ten times
as large.
Compared with other geological hazards, landslide zones are very narrow, very
specific, and relatively easy to avoid. Unfortunately, they're often also
attractive places to live. The Puget Sound lowlands are a good example. Born of
mud and ice, these unstable hills of sand, silt, and gravel were bulldozed and
compacted by glaciers that obliterated much of the geological record before the
Holocene. The jagged shoreline edges some of the newest real estate in the
country, and some of the most coveted. But a third of it -- some 660 miles along
the islands and mainland -- is composed of steep bluffs continually subject to
collapse.
(Description)
The Rolling Bay slide took about three seconds, scooping a narrow track only
about three feet deep down the face of the cliff. The cumulative weight of even
a shallow debris flow is enormous: in this case 2,000 tons of rocks, trees, and
sodden soil landed with uncanny accuracy on the Herrens' house. It was all over
before the couple next door, who were sitting outside in their hot tub,
realized what was happening. There was a sudden giant
exhalation -- whumpf! -- as the air was pushed out of the collapsing house.
A forty-foot fir tree, its saucer-shaped root system intact, slid down the
cliff and halted atop the wreckage, as erect as if it had been planted there.
Seven houses down in the opposite direction another neighbor heard the noise
and walked outside in her bathrobe to look around. She saw the shattered
plywood walls on the beach, the mountain of mud, and the tree standing
serenely. She heard no more sounds. "It was utterly still,"she later told me.
"So still that I thought this must have happened the night before, and I just
hadn't noticed."
--> to Conditions that led to slide
When Dave Montgomery, an assistant professor of geology at the University of
Washington, saw the front-page story in the newspaper the next day, he shook
his head. "I looked at that picture in the paper," he told me afterward, "and I
thought, My God -- here's a cliff that's been moving backward for 10,000 years.
Why would you live below it?" Since the last Ice Age the cliff at Rolling Bay
has not so much stood as retreated, retaining a steep pitch that teases the
angle of repose -- the maximum angle at which a slope will hold fast. "Normal
slopes tend to round over time. A steep, straight slope is something that is
created and maintained by landslides," Montgomery says.
In the stormy weeks before the Herrens were killed, Seattle newspapers carried
many reminders of the dangers of steep slopes: a man's house was destroyed
beneath him as he rode it into the water like a ship's captain; a mudslide
slammed into a freight train and threw it into Puget Sound, from the same
tracks where an Amtrak train carrying 650 passengers had passed only two hours
before; city officials spent $900,000 in a Sisyphean effort to stabilize a
sagging section of Seattle's Magnolia Bluff, where a half dozen homes were
losing their precarious perch. These stories were read not as cautionary tales
but as entertaining anecdotes about life in the rainy Northwest.
"We all live with risks," Dietrich says. "But we have some sense of those
risks. Most people have no sense of the landslide risk. You don't live
through a landslide at your house very often. Now, we have places that we can
easily identify that were formed by periodic debris flows. I would never live
in one of those places. You couldn't pay me anything to live there. If that's
the case, then how do I inform a person who's thinking of living there, or is
already living there, enough to realize the decision they're making?"
Continued...
The online version of this article appears in three parts. Click here to go
to part two. Click here to go
to part three.
Brenda Bell has written for the Los Angeles Times Magazine and Utne Reader. She is at work on a historical novel set in the Southwest.
Illustration by Bryant Wang
Copyright © 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All
rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; January 1999; The Liquid Earth; Volume 283, No. 1; pages 58 - 72.
|