Active search ends for missing persons in Washington slide

More than a month after a massive mudslide buried much of a small Washington state community, killing 41 people, authorities said Monday they had suspended the active search for two people who remain missing, believed to be buried under half a square mile of dirt and debris.

At times, people dug with their bare hands to find loved ones’ remains, but Steve Hadaway and Kris Regelbrugge have still not been found after a hillside collapsed on March 22 and swept across the community of Oso about an hour northeast of Seattle. Before the landslide, the town had about 180 residents.

"This has been a difficult decision" because the families of the two still missing seek closure, Snohomish County Sheriff Ty Trenary said at a news conference Monday.

Frank Hadaway, whose brother Steve remained missing, said he understood the county's decision.

"The amazing thing is that of 43 people who were lost, 41 were found," he told The Seattle Times.

At its peak, the efforts involved about 1,000 volunteers. They spent thousands of hours helping in the search or collecting donations for the community. Millions of dollars in private donations have been raised, and millions more in federal aid have been promised.

An active search could resume if conditions change, allowing crews into areas that were previously inaccessible due to large amounts of debris, officials said.

"To think about someone being left behind, that's unbearable to me," said Tim Ward, who was injured in the slide and whose wife, Brandy, died.

"The thought of Kris [Regelbrugge] still being out there on that property is so solemn to me. She put her soul into that land," he said.

The task now becomes clearing debris that wiped out the riverside community, blocked a state highway and partially dammed the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River.

Snohomish County Executive John Lovick said Monday that the county and state have formed a joint commission to independently review what happened before and after the slide, including what the county knew about landslide dangers in the area.

"There will be a lot of questions, and we hope to have a lot of answers," he said. Lovick also said he has heard talk about turning the slide area into a memorial site, but they need to talk to family members first.

Conditions also remain dangerous, and authorities “are still concerned about safety in the slide area.”

"This area is very dangerous and unpredictable," Trenary said.

Landslides, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, are often caused by seismic activity. But John Vidale, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, told Al Jazeera in March that was not the case in Oso.

Washington's Department of Natural Resources has thus far attributed the disaster to the reactivation of a landslide from 2006 by heavy rainfall. The National Weather Service 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.

Al Jazeera and wire services