WATCH ABOVE: The disaster in Washington state is taking a big emotional toll on a devastated community and an exhausted search crew. John Daly reports.
Rescue crews searching the debris of the Washington mudslide say there are no heat signals to indicate any live or accessible victims from Saturday’s deadly mudslide.
Twenty-four people are confirmed dead after the slide, which struck a small community near Oso, Washington. Rescue crews have been using cadaver dogs, small bulldozers and even their hands to dig through metres of mud and other wreckage.
Dozens more people are still unaccounted for and rescue crews will now be using a grid system to make sure all areas have been covered multiple times.
READ MORE: 24 confirmed dead in Washington mudslide as recovery efforts continue
They have also been using a flare camera for hot spots, but with no luck.
“A hot spot, the flare camera will pick up a heat source, so we’re looking for anything, a human, an animal, that will give off a heat source,” said Bill Quistorf from the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office. “And so that will pick up on our cameras, they’re very sensitive, and we’re looking for anything. If the heat source is covered by anything substantial like dirt or timber, the flare camera is not going to pick that up. So it has to be fairly exposed to the top of that soil or debris.”
“We searched, we found no heat sources.”
Quistorf said the entire experience has been surreal.
“Especially the landscape,” he said. “One of my pilots described it as a moonscape.”
READ MORE: ‘I haven’t given up’ – Washington resident combs mudslide debris for his sister
At a press conference Wednesday afternoon, rescuers were on the defensive in the face of criticism the rescue was slow to start.
Helicopter crews from the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office were able to reach the scene of the mudslide just 30 minutes after the disaster happened, thanks to a nearby training exercise.
Crews had been about to take off from Taylor’s Landing when they received the call that a slide had occurred.
Once they arrived on scene, Quistorf said, they started to conduct rescue operations immediately.
In the first hour they were able to lift to safety rescue two women, a three-year-old child and an older man and an amputee who had been injured in the slide.
As more crews started to arrive more people were rescued and more bodies were discovered.
The Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office has conducted 44 hours of flying since Saturday.
Most of the people involved are volunteers and Quistorf said they could not respond this quickly without them.
“We’ve trained and we’ve practiced and we’ve conducted hundreds of rescues,”said Quistorf. “We just go into the rescue mode, the emotions can come later, but it’s all business.”
Watch: Bill Quistorf, chief pilot for the Snohomish County updates the media about the helicopter rescue mission taking place in the Oso, Washington area.
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