OSO — At 10:37 a.m. on March 22, Tim Ward was getting in the shower.
He’d turned on the water.
He slipped off his wedding ring.
Moments later, a towering wall of mud, branches and debris burst through the walls of the Steelhead Haven home where he had lived since 1989.
Ward heard his wife, Brandy, call his name, the last words she spoke before the mud swallowed her and the neighborhood where so many families had found a quiet country paradise on the banks of the North Fork Stillaguamish River.
A lawsuit filed Friday alleges that officials working for Snohomish County, the state of Washington and a Skagit County-based logging company all played roles in setting the stage for the tragedy.
There were multiple studies and other warnings, across decades, about the hillside’s danger. But the county, the state and Grandy Lake Forest Associates failed to take steps that would have protected people, said attorneys Corrie Yackulic and John Phillips in the King County Superior Court lawsuit.
Worse, those who lived below the hill were reassured they were safe, particularly after work was done to control river erosion after a large slide in 2006, the lawyers said.
“Natural hazards are a fact of life, but the extent to which a natural hazard turns into a disaster is often the result of what people and institutions do and do not do in the face of the natural hazard,” the lawyers wrote. “The 2014 Oso Landslide disaster was not ‘natural,’ but the result of a series of actions and inactions” by the defendants.
In all, 43 people were killed and at least a dozen more injured when more than 10 million cubic yards of water-logged earth swept across the valley.
In addition to Ward, the lawsuit represents survivors from nine other families who lost loved ones in the disaster. It is the largest bloc of people so far to bring a lawsuit.
They remain united in wanting to get answers, Yackulic said. Litigation gives attorneys the ability to carefully question officials about what they knew, what they did with that knowledge and what they told others.
“We’ve done as much investigation as we can to this point,” Yackulic said Friday.
The hill’s instability has been documented at least back to 1942 with aerial photographs, followed by a series of reports examining the area’s geology. Since 2003, officials have had access to the results of high-tech surveys that highlighted scars to the land left by numerous slides over thousands of years.
After a big slide in 1967, one state geologist opined that the scars from ancient slides showed that homes were popping up in a stretch of valley where construction “should be done with extreme caution,” the lawyers noted.
More reports followed over the years, some suggesting the need for a more detailed study of how groundwater moved through the hillside.
When the slope fell again in 2006, state and county officials responded by rerouting the river and authorizing construction of a wooden wall at the toe of the slide. The effort was aimed to shield fish from sediment but did little to protect people, the lawsuit says.
Geologists have since determined that the 2006 slide changed the hill’s topography, apparently increasing the ability of rain and runoff to percolate into the slope. That, in turn, reduced the hillside’s ability to resist the tug of gravity.
There was talk of additional studies into the risk that the slide-weakened hill presented. There was talk of buying out those living below.
“The county and state knew that as a result of their conduct the Hazel Landslide posed an immediate risk to human life, but instead of purchasing homes and relocating families, the county elected to improve fish habitat, to allow continued home construction on Steelhead Drive, and to provide false reassurance to the citizens whose lives hung in the balance that measures it was taking would protect them against disasters,” the lawsuit alleges.
The lawyers also say the state was negligent for ignoring studies that it paid for that raised questions about how logging may affect the hill’s stability. Timber harvests were approved on the hillside in 2004, 2009 and 2011.
Grandy Lake Forest Associates owned a portion of the land that was logged and built logging roads in the area. The lawsuit contends the work was done in violation of state forest-practices rules.
Scott North: 425-339-3431; north@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @snorthnews
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