Everyone interested has seen all of the photos and the footage of the rescuers; but what hasn't gotten much press is that the local community has a fair bit of anger about how the rescue is being handled.
The basic issue is that everyone wants to fix this. Everyone would like to make it better, and everyone would feel better about doing something -- anything -- vs just watching. This is particularly true of the residents in and around the slide, and up and down the valley.
When you live in a rural area in the mountains, like I do, you're used to doing for yourself. You own a chainsaw to clear fallen trees. You own a generator because the power is erratic; you get used to assessing the state of the river, and the danger of flood, and you own a good set of boots and raingear.
If you're like me, you're pretty used to mud, even a lot of mud. And if you're like me, you've even had formal rescue training; I'm a swiftwater rescue technician II, which means that i've completed the first course and the second one, too, and I've practiced those skills both in courses and in real life. I've pulled my share of bodies out of the river.
So you have a community, a region, of people who would like nothing better than to jump right in, and volunteers who are showing up to work are being turned away. Sure, there are some locals working on this, but the honest truth is that I think sometimes that they would have been better off to bring 500 shovels to the roadblock and just handed one out to everyone who showed up. Even if it didn't really make much difference to the rescue effort -- it's pretty clear that anyone not rescued saturday is dead, and was dead minutes after the earth starting moving - it would have allowed the community some sense of having taken direct action.
Take a look at this story in the local paper -- summary? Some guy with his dog drove 90 minutes down and was walking around on the site. I have no idea if he was doing any good, but he wasn't being paid by anyone, and maybe be could have found someone. Maybe he'd get himself killed, too. But what's important about that story isn't the guy -- look at the community reaction:
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Since you are up in that area now, do you by chance know if the Sawyers, Sunnie and Mike, and if they and their animals are ok? They live behind the landslide, about a mile from where it happened, towards Darrington. We got our ewes from them and we haven't been able to find out if they're ok.
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