so, so sad. RIP, steelhead drive. may the count of the dead stay where it is.

let me know when it's time to point fingers at the green lighting of that subdivision.

Was reading that much like New Orleans there were warnings about this over 15 years ago.

Should I feel sympathy for someone's horse farm going under when I live in 825 sq. ft. and keep my nose to the grindstone?

yes, you should.

it's called being human.

Yes. Even if people living in the area were millionaires, THEY DIED. So maybe don't be a dick.

"Should I feel sympathy for someone's horse farm going under when I live in 825 sq. ft. and keep my nose to the grindstone?"

What the fuck?

@2
It doesn't matter who you are, this is a horrible way to die. Don't put your Marxist grievances on natural disasters. That paradigm might apply to the response and priorities of local governments, but it doesn't apply here.

You're a hard man, aren't you. Show everyone how hard you are. Show everyone how raw your radicalism is. Even Mudede knows better.

@2 Also, "I told you so" is going to be what everyone says when the fault line shakes, or the volcano erupts, and you and your precious collection of false dichotomies is buried under the weight. That's what you get for living on a fault line.That's what you get for living in the shadow of a volcano.

@2

I don't know. Did you have any sympathy when you heard of all of Mitt and Ann's hard times?

Supreme Leader of the Universe a Marxist? You must be new to Slog....

But yes, he is most definitely a bore. Always has been, always will be.

I'm not new to Slog, I just have enough of a life not to have a full breakdown of the political and ethical proclivities of the regular commenters. And he was certainly trying to appropriate an anti-bourgeoisie paradigm. In a self serving, "all these people died but what about myyyyyy suffering" kind of way.

Also I hate the commenting format. It makes it impossible to carry on an actual dialogue.

That isn't because of any political affiliations, Stilettov. It's because he's an asshole.

@10 Seattle is my home town and I love it, but I can't say I miss the aspiration to sociopathy that is at the root of its alienated species of hipster ideology. Slog likes to contend that word is subjective, but I think Supreme Ruler has it in a nutshell. Narcissistic and ready to capitalize on the misery of others in order to project a persona.

They aren't millionaires, they are farmers, and those are people you're talking about. Those people probably grew up in that tiny town, and struggled with other disasters, like humans do. There was a family there who lost their house in the Taylor Bridge fire last year and are homeless, again. That family has five children to look after. And 'I told you so' is just about as childish as you can get, the landscape in Washington is beautiful, living there is beautiful. Have some empathy, these people were literally buried alive and killed.

@14 I'm picking up what you're putting down.

That NY Times "infographic" is inaccurate. The slide started much further up the hillside. The Seattle Times has a much better graphic.

@2: FUCK YOU, you ignorant fucking fuck.

Isn't it strange how the local aspect gets us fired up more? The missing plane story involved many more people, but this story is local. You all might know people involved (condolences). I don't, but I've driven through there and fished there many times; had beers and pizza served in these communities, so it seems more personal. These people are our extended community. I'm going to give @2 the benefit of the doubt and say that his snark is misguided (you've been doing so well lately, SROTU!) and that he's dealing with a local tragedy in his own way.

The County has known about the danger of building there for over a decade. Those deaths are their fault.

I was struck by a comment from a woman interviewed on NPR, who said in essence, "What can you do?! You can't just fall down and give up. A slide like this could happen ANYWHERE!"

She's right on the first point and completely wrong on the second, but it's a reminder that to many people without much science education, the whole natural world is mysterious and vaguely threatening. That's why governments need to study and interpret and regulate, but to do that properly again we've got to get past this mindset where a) people don't remain in jobs long enough anymore to really learn their stuff, and b) paper documents on a shelf are scorned because they don't have that freshly-Googled smell. The detailed geologic reports by the Millers from 1997 and 1999, described in the Seattle Times, should have carried a lot more weight in decision-making than they apparently did.

As bad as hipsters are, they are no worse than people that whine and moan their entire lives about how rotten the government is, and weaken it to the point it has no teeth whatsoever to regulate the corporate monsters destroying the earth. These include the profiteers that have been clearcutting this particular valley and the entire northwest like maniacs since the 1980s when their hero Ronald junk-bond Reagan threw the national forests open to liquidation.

Mudslides happen all over this clearcut state, just usually not where a suburb has crept in. I drive this road ten times a year and have noticed plenty of new cuts just in the last two years. Google Earth clearly shows the mountaintop above this shelf was clearcut bald. An entire mountaintop no less! The shelf behind this slide clearly shows a tree farm with trees that might be about 25 years old, right on schedule for the rah-rah late 80s. The slide area itself was also obviously clearcut, after almost certainly having been cut for its biggest trees one at a time in the old days, when men were no less base, but at least didn't have the capacity to clearcut, and had to cut one tree at a time.

I hope there are hipster environmentalists out there, although hipster is innacurate anyway, because none of you are Ginsburg or Burroughs. Just pay attention to the world you're in, unless all you want to be doing in the future is combat and gardening.

I hope the Stranger hires a geologist and a forestry expert, and someone blows the lid off of all the timber lease history in this area, and what the glorious WA Dept of Natural Resources did in this area. DId you know they've been successfully sued in the past for the results of slides from clearcuts, just for the loss of a restaurant? Think what the state could end up paying here?

Republicans, do you care where this tax money goes now, or is the payoff for the profit AOK with you after all, just like defense?

A town of 180 people isn't a suburb.

Can we please hold off with the accusations until all of the bodies are found?

I hope and pray this is a non event and that most of the missing people are found.

That open swath on the left side of the aerial picture is the City Light Skagit Transmission Corridor. If the slide had taken that out, we'd be in trouble.

@24 the term hipster needs context, and in Seattle's context, I tend to think of it as a group of wannabe beats who are more interested in putting up guitars on the walls of their Belltown condos than they are with actually helping anyone. There is a thin fucking line between liberal slacktivist and in-all-but-name libertarian. You can easily pick them out as the kind of people who would rather announce that a landslide was a bonus point for the proletariat, a blessing for the working man, like Supreme Ruler up there. Ultimately, they're the kind of people that would rather stay in their comfortable little ideological territory than ever trouble to muddy their feet in service to a humanitarian cause. I agree that the trappings of hipsterism are irrelevant- but I think there's an ideology that is open to critique. Flaccid and passive an ideology as it is.

The first thing people do when anything like this happens is look around to find someone who is accountable, and assign blame. Oh, it was a danger zone. Oh, they're rich people who don't care. Oh, the county, oh, the government. And maybe there is some blame that does need to be assigned. But it doesn't do any good for anybody who has died, or lost someone. I'm a few hundred miles away, and even I'm a hypocrite in this. But we all live in a dangerous world. Sinkholes open under us. Mountains fall on top of us. Floods drown our cities. Fires reduce communities to ashes. Tornadoes and hurricanes rip up foundations. And still we have smug little cunts like Supreme Ruler of the Universe who would rather whine about how unfair life has been to him. Oh, poor little victim. You poor, poor little victim. And yet if his apartment collapsed tomorrow, someone would be there to dig his pathetic, worthless ass out of the rubble.

From the images I have seen and Google Maps, it appears to me this entire area was clear-cut of all timber sometime ago. There do not appear any of the very large trees of original stands in the area. No news has mentioned clear-cutting.