Collapse: The Oso Mudslide and the Community That Survived It
By Brooke Jarvis
THE VOICE ON THE RADIO ISN’T MAKING SENSE.
It keeps talking about people screaming, but Willy Harper can hear only one person: a woman, somewhere close. She has a baby with her, someone yelled, and Harper and a small group of civilians are trying desperately to reach her, balancing on the splintered logs and crumpled bits of house that line the edge of the mudslide. They can’t see much beyond the abandoned home washed into the highway. Only mud, endless and everywhere, too thin and soupy to support their weight.
“What do you mean the people screaming?” he says into his handheld, which connects him to another firefighter, a man he knows from Darrington, the town on the other side of the slide. “I hear one lady screaming.”
“No,” the voice replies. “We can hear three men.”
Harper turns to the civilians, young guys smeared gray with mud. Some he knows, others he doesn’t; some are ripping pieces of tin off a roof, trying to build a path to spread out their weight so they don’t sink waist deep every time they fall off a shifting log. They’ve been told not to go into the slide, which blankets live power lines and jagged metal and who knows what else, but they’ve gone anyway.
“Stop,” Harper says. He’s 36 but looks younger—so much so that the president, when he comes to tour the devastation a month from now, will mention it in his speech. He’ll also call Harper a sheriff, which he’s not. Oso doesn’t have a sheriff, a town cop, or a mayor. Harper is a volunteer, the chief of a crew of volunteers that, in a busy year, might respond to two or three house fires. Mostly it’s car accidents, heart attacks. But this?
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http://www.seattlemet.com/news-and-profiles/articles/first-responders-of-the-oso-mudslide-november-2014
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