Last fatality from Washington state landslide found

Officials at the Snohomish County sheriff's office in Washington state said Tuesday they believe they have found the last body from the March 22 mudslide that killed 43 people in the mountain community of Oso.

Although the search for victims ended in April, workers had been screening debris and watching for the body of 44-year-old Molly Kristine "Kris" Regelbrugge.

Her husband, Navy Cmdr. John Regelbrugge III, was also killed in the slide that hit their home.

The news came the same day as an independent investigation into the mudslide was released. The report found that several factors, including previous mudslides in the area, heavy rain, and possibly logging had made the hill weaker, increasing the odds that a slide would happen again.

The report, released by an international consortium of scientists called the Geotechnical Extreme Events  Reconnaissance Association, did not pinpoint any one factor in causing the slide, which dumped about 10 million cubic yards of debris across a valley and over a rural neighborhood.

One of the mysteries of the slide was why the debris traveled so far. U.S. Geological Survey estimates had modeled a slide in that area to travel only one-third as far as the March 22 slide did. The new report questions those estimates, saying that based on previous slides in the area, the most recent was “not exceptional.”

The finding that the slide’s size was somewhat predictable may add fuel to arguments that homes should never have been built in that area.

Geologists had predicted the area’s instability decades before the March 22 event.

“I don’t think the fact that the slide happened surprised anyone who has looked at this area before,” Doug Heiken, the conservation and restoration coordinator with local nonprofit Oregon Wild, told Al Jazeera in March. “It wasn’t really a matter of if, but when.”

Al Jazeera with wire services