Mudslide kills 24, nearly 200 feared missing or unaccounted for in Washington

Rescuers found 10 more bodies in the debris of a Washington state mudslide on Tuesday, bringing the death toll from the devastating slide to 24, authorities said during an evening press conference. Two bodies were recovered and eight were more located amid the wreckage, Snohomish County Fire District Chief Travis Hots said. More than 200 local, state and federal responders have gathered in rural Oso, north of Seattle, to dig through Saturday's slide, which destroyed 30 homes and left scores still missing. Authorities spoke Tuesday of a slow day of searching - with no signs of life - as rain poured down. At least 176 were unaccounted for, but that number has likely dropped because of repeated reports of the same missing person and updates that other people were safe. Despite some diminishing hope, authorities still called the search a rescue - and recovery - mission for any possible survivors. Survivors recounted terror during the natural disaster that struck Saturday. First there was a “whoosh.” Elaine Young said she thought it might be a chimney fire, a rush of air that lasted about 45 seconds. But when she stepped outside there was ominous silence. Something felt very, very wrong. And then she saw it. Behind the house, a suffocating wall of heavy mud had crashed through the neighborhood. Dark and sticky, the mile-long flow Saturday heaved houses off their foundations, toppled trees and left a gaping cavity on what had been a tree-covered hillside. In the frantic rescue, searchers spotted mud-covered survivors by the whites of their waving palms. Now, days into the search, the scale of the mudslide’s devastation in a rural village north of Seattle is becoming apparent. “We found a guy right here,” shouted a rescuer Monday afternoon behind Young’s home, after a golden retriever search dog found a corpse pinned under a pile of fallen trees. Searchers put a bag over the body, tied an orange ribbon on a branch to mark the site, and the crew moved on. 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 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers of “the potential for a large catastrophic failure,” The Seattle Times reported late Monday.