Washington mudslide devastation grows

 WASHINGTON (AP):

The scale of a massive mudslide's devastation in a rural village north of Seattle is becoming apparent days after a wall of heavy mud heaved houses off their foundations, toppled trees and left a gaping cavity on what had been a tree-covered hillside.

At least 16 people are confirmed dead, dozens more are thought to be unaccounted for or missing, and about 30 homes are destroyed.

It had been stormy for weeks, but warm sunshine offered a false sense of peace Saturday morning as weekend visitors settled into their vacation homes and locals slept in. Then came "a giant slump", said David Montgomery, an earth and space sciences professor at the University of Washington, describing the deep-seated slide resulting from long-term, heavy rainfall.

A scientist who documented the landslide conditions on the hillside that buckled had warned in a 1999 report filed with the US Army Corps of Engineers of "the potential for a large catastrophic failure", The Seattle Times reported late Monday.

Knew it would happen

That report was written by geomorphologist Daniel J. Miller and his wife, Lynne Rodgers Miller, The Times said. "We've known it would happen at some point," Daniel Miller told the newspaper.

At a news conference in the Netherlands on Tuesday, President Barack Obama asked Americans to send their thoughts and prayers to Washington state as search operations continue. The president called Washington Governor Jay Inslee early Tuesday, said Jaime Smith, an Inslee spokeswoman.

Within hours of the mudslide, emergency crews were searching for life in a post-apocalyptic scene, dodging chunks of splintered birch trunks, half-buried pickup trucks and growing pools of water from the now-blocked Stillaguamish River.