10 years after Oso landslide, a new memorial is a gathering place for remembrance

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t’s been 10 years since a massive landslide near the small village of Oso in Snohomish County killed 43 people, wiped out an entire neighborhood, and buried State Route 530 in mud. It was the deadliest landslide in U.S. history.

For many who witnessed the tragedy and survived, the memories of that day remain as clear as the morning of March 22, 2014, when their lives were forever changed.

“9-1-1. What’s your emergency?”

“There’s a mudslide and everything’s gone. The houses are gone. I mean, all I see is dirt now. We watched tons of trees come falling.”

“OK, are there any injuries?”

“Yes, there are people yelling for help!”

Robin Youngblood said the landslide sounded like a jetliner making an emergency landing in the valley. She and a houseguest ran to a dining room window where they saw a wall of mud coming toward her home in the slide area.

“We heard this huge sound. All I can think to myself is, ‘If you want me, here I am,’ because there’s nothing I can do about this,” Youngblood recalled.

As the wave of mud hit her house and sent it hurtling across the valley, Youngblood and her friend managed to stay afloat and not be buried by mud or debris. They were later rescued by a helicopter.

“Unfortunately, I still remember it vividly,” Youngblood said. “My guest, who had a tree across her when we landed, doesn’t actually remember any of that. I personally think she’s very lucky.”

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Joel Johnson was one of the first on the scene. He was 29 years old, and it was his first solo call as chaplain for the fire department.

He said he stayed on the site for 38 days, working through rescues and recoveries of the dead as tons of mud, broken homes, and debris were cleared.

He kept repeating one Bible verse — Psalm 119, Verse 116.

“It says, ‘Lord, sustain me, as you promised. Do not let my hope be crushed,’” Johnson recalled. “I’ve just literally hung on to that ever since.”

When John and Frank Hadaway learned their brother was missing, they drove to the scene to help with the search. Steve Hadaway, a former Marine, didn’t live on Steelhead Drive. He was there for work, installing a satellite dish when the slide hit.

John and Frank Hadaway worked on the pile for weeks.

“We just wanted to bring him home,” John Hadaway said. “You know, as they say in the Marines, they leave no man behind.”

Steve Hadaway’s remains were found on Memorial Day weekend.

Oso Slide Memorial unveiled

To mark the 10-year anniversary of that fateful day, a permanent memorial will be unveiled Friday on State Route 530, near the North Fork Stillaguamish River.

The memorial is years in the making. It stands at what used to be the entrance to the Steelhead Drive neighborhood and features a group of panels, each dedicated to the people who died, with individual elements chosen by their families.

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Johnson, the firefighter chaplain who was among the first to arrive at the scene, is now the chief of Darrington Fire District 24. He described a panel in memory of the Ruthven family.

“This was the one single-family unit that lost the most loved ones,” Johnson said. “You've got Shane and Katie, and their boys Wyatt and Hunter. And then his parents Lou and Judy.”

The panel features a quote: “You'll be in my heart always." It also contains a picture of the family and a depiction of native plants and wildlife from the area.

“This is very representative of them,” Johnson said.

Nearby, a circular gathering space is anchored by a soaring steel sculpture designed by Seattle artist Tsovinar Muradyan. The sculpture is situated so that every year on the anniversary of the slide, at 10:37 in the morning, if the skies are clear, the sun’s rays pass through the sculpture and land on a boulder dislodged by the slide.

Carved on that boulder are the words, “Hope is seeing the light despite the darkness.”

Darrington Mayor Dan Rankin said that although the area has transformed, he is haunted by what he saw on that quiet Saturday a decade ago.

“It was so unbelievable, that you couldn’t get your head wrapped around what you were seeing,” he said. “It just didn’t seem possible.”

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In the wake of the deadly slide, Rankin said some people have moved away because they were constantly reminded of the tragedy.

“Even after the highway opened again, some folks couldn’t deal with it,” he said.

As for Joel Johnson, the former chaplain and current Darrington fire chief, he said he prays for those who were lost and for the ones who survived the Oso landslide every day, on his way to and from work.

“Everybody’s getting prayed for at least twice a day that I’m driving by,” Johnson said. “That’s just another way that I feel like I can honor that memory, too.”