The landslide, however, moved the river 730 feet

Risk of slide Warnings go back decades

canada goose coats on sale Since the 1950s, geological reports on the hill that buckled during the weekend in Snohomish County Canada Goose Jackets have included pessimistic analyses and the occasional dire prediction. Army Corps of Engineers, warning of potential for a large catastrophic failure. report was written by Daniel J. Miller and his wife, Canada Goose Outlet Lynne Rodgers canada goose clearance sale Miller. When she saw the news of the mudslide Saturday, she knew right away where the land had given way. Her husband knew, too. canada goose coats on sale

canada goose known it would happen at some point, he told The Seattle Times on Monday. just didn know when. Miller, a geomorph also documented the hill landslide conditions in a report written in 1997 for the Washington Department of Ecology and the Tulalip Tribes. He knows the hill history, having collected reports and memos from the 1950s, canada goose coats on sale 1960s, 1980s and 1990s. He has a half dozen manila folders stuffed with maps, slides, models and drawings, all telling the story of an unstable hillside that has defied efforts to shore it up. canada goose

Canada Goose Parka That why he could not believe what he saw in 2006, when he returned to http://www.canadagoosesalesus.com the hill within weeks of a landslide that crashed into and plugged the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River, creating a new channel that threatened homes on a street called Steelhead Drive. Instead of seeing homes being vacated, he saw carpenters building new ones. Canada Goose Parka

I was shocked that the county permitted any building across from the river, he said.

canada goose clearance sale known that it been canada goose clearance failing, he said canada goose of canada goose uk black friday the hill. not unknown that this hazard exists. Forest Service, and was hired by King County in the 1990s to map out its geologically hazardous areas. canada goose clearance sale

very safe perspective stands in contrast buy canada goose jacket to what John Pennington, head of Snohomish County Department of Emergency Management, said at a news Canada Goose Coats On Sale conference Monday. was considered very safe, Pennington said. was a completely unforeseen slide. This came out of nowhere. 2006 slide took Canada Goose sale place in winter, on Jan. 25. Three days later, as the new channel cut the land, and agency staff reported the eerie sound of trees constantly snapping as the river pushed them over, wrote the Canada Goose Parka Stillaguamish Tribe Natural Resource Department on its website. But the sound of construction competed Canada Goose Online with the sound of snapping trees.

didn even stop pounding nails, said Tracy Drury, an environmental engineer and applied geomorphologist who assessed the area with Miller soon after the landslide. were surprised. least five homes were built in 2006 on Steelhead Drive, according canada goose uk shop to Snohomish County records. The houses were granted hazard permits that required them to be jacked up 1 to 2 feet above flood elevation, according to county building permit records. Another home was built in the neighborhood in 2009.

buy canada goose jacket Snohomish County Executive John Lovick and Public Works Director Steve Thomsen said Monday night they were not aware of the 1999 report. slide of this magnitude is very difficult to predict, Thomsen said. was no indication, no indication at all. Irvin Wood and his wife, Judith, of Bothell, owned the last home permitted in the slide zone, a double wide mobile home they bought and moved onto a forested lot last year. buy canada goose jacket

canada goose coats The Woods used the property as a weekend getaway, sometimes bringing their grandkids. But they were not there on Saturday when the mudslide wiped out the mobile home and swept away neighbors who are now missing and presumed dead. canada goose coats

buy canada goose jacket cheap Wood, who has owned other property in the area for decades, said was warning anybody about the probability of a massive landslide. But he said it was unrealistic expectation for people to think the government canada goose outlet could prevent such disasters. buy canada goose jacket cheap

canada goose black friday Canada Goose online sale like saying the river is going to flood, Wood said. the hillsides were going to slough away, they were going to slough away. That kind of what happens around here. for landslides canada goose black friday sale

Canada Goose Jackets The hill that collapsed last weekend is referred to by uk canada goose outlet geologists with different names, including Hazel Landslide and Steelhead Haven Landslide, a reference to the hillside constant movement. Some residents, according to a 1967 Seattle Times story, referred to it simply as Hill. two landslides on the hill one in 1949, another in 1951 two state agencies, the Department of Game and the Department of Fisheries, commissioned a report from Seattle engineering firm William D. Shannon and Associates. Canada Goose Jackets

The 1949 slide was nearly 1,000 feet long and took out about 2,600 feet of the river bank, according to the Shannon report. The scarp the face of the cliff where the slide broke away was 70 feet tall in places. There were no injuries and no reports of structural damage.

Canada Goose sale In 1951, debris from canada goose store the denuded slide area formed a mudflow that partially dammed the river. Shannon noted that the two creeks in the area are known as Creek and Flow Creek. Shannon report was not commissioned out of safety concerns but over complaints that sediment from the slide was clogging the river and degrading the salmon fishery. Canada Goose sale

Shannon concluded that a main cause of the slides is the river eroding the of a previous slide, which supports the millions of tons of dirt behind it, like someone with their back against a bulging door. Eventually, the toe would fail and gravity would pull the mountain down again.

Asked if there was a way to control the slides, Shannon wrote canadian goose jacket that one possibility would be permanently diverting the river.

canada goose clearance He also suggested building berms and reinforcing the slide area. However, he noted that a professor he had hired to look at the issue from a geological standpoint, Howard Coombs of the University of Washington, concluded that any fix would likely be temporary and that the slide area could be expected to expand. canada goose clearance

Canada Goose Outlet is almost impossible from a practical standpoint to stabilize this slide in its present position. The slope will continue to slide and the area will increase, Coombs concluded in an addendum to the Shannon report. ditches, dikes, walls, etc., would give at best only temporary relief. The structures would need constant repair and replacement. records show that actual embankment control measures were done until the fall of 1960. At that time more than a thousand feet of berm was constructed at the upstream end of the slide, using rocks and other material. Canada Goose Outlet

The berm was destroyed by high water in the Stillaguamish the following year, state records show.

Canada Goose online In 1962, the state installed a a sort of rock barrier to try to protect and support the riverbank. But oozing mud the barrier canada goose black friday sale two years later. In 1967 the barrier was buried when a massive slide hit, damaging dozens of homes. Canada Goose online

cheap Canada Goose In 1969, cheap Canada Goose a geologist with the state Department of Natural Resources, Gerald Thorsen, submitted a memorandum after visiting the site of the slide. He explained that photographs taken as far back as 1932 show the river has cut at this clay bank for many years. cheap Canada Goose

Thorsen noted that a 150 foot section of the scarp wall had caved, resulting in a dangerous, several hundred foot mudflow of uk canada goose the same sort albeit small in comparison that rescuers are facing today.

canada goose deals across the slide surface is extremely treacherous, Thorsen wrote, of hidden of saturated material that will not support a man weight. investigation done in the 1980s said the landslide activity had expanded from 10 acres in 1942 to 35 acres in 1970. canada goose deals

canada goose store Saturday monster slide left a scarp of nearly 600 feet, about nine times taller than the 1949 slide and four times taller than the one in 1967. canada goose coats canada goose store

The 2006 slide disrupted risk mitigation projects already in the works. Officials planned to move the river flow 430 feet to the south, providing more buffer at the base of the hillside. The landslide, however, moved the river 730 feet.

In the summer of 2006, crews went on to install a 1,300 foot wall of boom logs some more than 3 canada goose factory sale feet in diameter anchored with cheap canada goose uk 9,000 pound concrete blocks every 50 feet. The wall was designed to protect fish by preventing sediment from washing into the river.

It was no match for this week mudslide.

always thought there was a possibility that a catastrophic event could come, said Pat Stevenson, environmental manager of the Stillaguamish Tribe. were hoping that wouldn happen. the environmental engineer, and Stevenson said there were discussions over the years about whether to buy out the property owners in the area, but those talks never developed into serious proposals.

think we did the best that we could under the constraints that nobody wanted to sell their property and move, Drury said.