Community waits in anguish to hear full death toll of Wash. mudslide

Workers comb through debris at the site of a deadly mudslide, Friday, March 28, 2014, in Oso, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

ARLINGTON, Wash. -- A mountainside community waited in anguish Friday to learn the full scope of the Washington state mudslide as authorities worked to identify remains and warned that they were unlikely to find anyone alive nearly a week after the disaster.

Leslie Zylstra said everybody in town knows someone who died, and the village was coming to grips with the fact that many of the missing will never turn up.

"The people know there's no way anybody could have survived," said Zylstra, who used to work in an Arlington hardware store. "They just want to have their loved ones, to bury their loved ones."

Authorities delayed an announcement that they said would substantially raise the death toll to allow the Snohomish County medical examiner's office to continue with identification efforts.

That job, along with the work of the exhausted searchers, was complicated by the sheer magnitude of the devastation from Saturday's slide. Tons of earth and ambulance-sized boulders of clay smashed everything in their path, leaving unrecognizable remnants in their wake.

"There's a process that we have in place, and I don't want to get into too many details of that," Snohomish County District 21 Fire Chief Travis Hots said Friday. "It's not as simple as saying this is the number of people that we have that we have recovered."

The fire chief said he expected to receive an update from the medical examiner's office by Friday evening.

Authorities have acknowledged the deaths of at least 25 people -- with 17 bodies recovered. Reports of more bodies being found have trickled in from relatives and workers on the scene.

Searchers are working from a list of 90 missing people, which equates to about half of the population of Oso, a North Cascades foothills community some 55 miles northeast of Seattle.

That list has not been made public, but officials have said it includes not just residents who may have been in their homes but others thought to be in the area or travelling state highway 530 when the slide struck.

Authorities have all but eliminated the possibility that some people on the list may have been out of the area and simply have not checked in. And they warned the chances of finding anyone alive amid the tons of silt and mud was slim.

"I would say there's always some hope, but," Tom Miner said Thursday, trailing off before finishing his thought. He is an urban search-and-rescue leader for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Besides the 90 missing, authorities are checking on 35 other people who may or may not have been in the area at the time of the slide.

The mudslide could go down as one of Washington's worst disasters, along with the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens that killed 57 people and a 1910 avalanche near Stevens Pass that swept away two trains and killed 96.

The deadliest landslides in history include one that killed 500 people when a dam in San Francisquito, Calif., collapsed in 1928, causing an abutment to give way, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Storms have triggered other catastrophic slides, including one that killed 150 people in Virginia in the wake of Hurricane Camille in 1969 and another that killed 129 when rain from Tropical Storm Isabel loosened tons of mud that buried the Puerto Rican community of Mameyes in 1985.

Rescuers, military personnel, volunteers and search dogs pressed on Friday, driven by the hope of finding at least one survivor.

When a dog reacts to a particular spot, searchers probe a wide area because the scent may take a path up through the debris as far as 50 feet away from the source, Hots said.

They watch the reaction of the dogs as they probe, and if a second one confirms the location, they begin to dig with shovels and their hands to reach the person, he said.

"They don't quit. Sometimes it takes several hours to get somebody out of an area," Hots said.

The county medical examiner's office has so far formally identified five victims: Christina Jefferds, 45, of Arlington; Stephen A. Neal, 55, of Darrington; Linda L. McPherson, 69, of Arlington; Kaylee B. Spillers, 5, of Arlington and William E. Welsh, 66, of Arlington.

The body of Jefferds' granddaughter, 4-month-old Sanoah Huestis, was found Thursday, said Dale Petersen, the girl's great-uncle.