Search for warning signs is losing game in battle against mudslides

President Barack Obama has asked Americans to direct thoughts and prayers to Oso, Wash., after a colossal mudslide on Saturday killed at least 14 people and left 176 others missing.

Sadly, local and national disaster analysts say there’s little else that can be done to protect people who live in areas commonly impacted by dangerous mudslides.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention suggests people living in affected areas contact local authorities about emergency and evacuation plans or "consider leaving" their homes.

In short, the official response to people living in areas like Oso who are seeking ways to avoid future disasters appears to be: move.

Meanwhile, in Oso and environs the situation is getting worse. The official death toll is expected to rise Tuesday, rescue staff told the press.

Landslides, the CDC says, are often caused by seismic activity. But John Vidale, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, told Al Jazeera that was not the case in Oso, although the network continues to study seismic activity in the minutes, days and weeks before the disaster.

There was a negligible 1.1 magnitude quake close to Oso on March 10, Vidale said. But at this point, Vidale's researchers are "confident" seismic activity didn't provoke the mudslide.

Vidale is struggling for warning signs, in what he describes as a losing game.

"The impact of what we're doing is to see if there are things we should have looked for," Vidale said. "It's like earthquakes – we're always looking for signs beforehand … but there's no way to believe we're going to be predicting earthquakes any time soon.”

Washington's Department of Natural Resources has thus far attributed the disaster to the reactivation of a landslide from 2006 by heavy rainfall. The NWS reported an unusually large amount of rainfall in the area – saying Seattle had its seventh wettest February on record this year at 6.11 inches of rainfall. Local news reported 200 percent the normal amount of rainfall in the Oso area in little over a month preceding the mudslide.

Given recent heavy rainfall patterns, some experts say that combatting climate change may be humankind’s best bet to limiting the threat of landslides.

University of Washington professor David Montgomery, who studies the evolution of topography and its influence on human societies, told environmental news outlet EarthFix on Sunday that "if the climate changes in a way that we get a lot more rainfall, you would expect to see a lot more landslides."