Rescuers searching with shovels, high-tech cameras and their bare hands found the bodies of three children and an adult before dawn on Wednesday, bringing the death toll from a mudslide in the Californian seaside hamlet of La Conchita to 10, an official said.
Ventura county fire Captain Danny Rodriguez said the bodies were found as crews worked around the clock for a second straight night, swarming the debris pile under clear skies and powerful klieg lights.
Officials said 13 people remained missing after Monday’s 9m-deep mudslide, which was triggered by five days of nearly non-stop rain. It was not immediately known if that number included the four people found on Tuesday. With the 10 known dead at La Conchita, the storm’s toll in California has risen to 25 since Friday.
The four dead were the wife and three daughters of La Conchita resident Jimmie Wallet, Ventura county sheriff’s chaplain Ron Matthews told The Associated Press. Wallet had said he had left his wife and three daughters to buy ice cream and was leaving the store when he saw the river of earth curve toward his block. He ran toward his home but it was buried.
Wallet had been among the most visible of the town’s residents since the slide as he frantically searched alongside firefighters for his 37-year-old wife, Mechelle, and daughters Hannah (10),
Raven (six) and Paloma (two).
After the bodies were found, friends took him out of town with his 16-year-old daughter, who was in Ventura when the slide hit.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was to tour the area on Wednesday.
The days of torrential rains also triggered fatal traffic accidents all across the state, knocked out power to hundreds of thousands, imperilled hillside homes and caused flash floods.
Race against time
In La Conchita, firefighters remained hopeful they might still find at least some people alive, while acknowledging that any survivors would have to be found quickly.
”The rescuers are continuing to find some voids between the collapsed structures,” Ventura county fire chief Bob Roper said Wednesday on NBC’s Today show.
Ten people were injured in the slide, which came down like a curving, rolling waterfall on to the tiny town between Highway 101 and a coastal bluff in Ventura county.
Fifteen homes were destroyed and 16 were damaged. Roper said the slide rolled homes over and intermixed debris, hindering efforts to identify the rubble of specific houses.
Early on Wednesday, chain saws buzzed as bulldozers and backhoes crunched through sections of the debris pile that were being cleared from the town, having failed to yield any bodies or survivors after more than a day of probing. Diesel exhaust from their equipment hung heavily in the air.
Residents and families also picked through the muddy rubble. One resident pulled out a torn curtain, others dug up a broken clothes hanger, a stack of recipes and a backpack. Nearby, an enormous passenger bus lay on its side, a white sedan crushed underneath.
The painstaking search through layer upon layer of muck was made more difficult by the jumble of stiff pieces of homes that had mixed with the mud, including baseboards, doors and frames.
Dogs search for victims
Rescuers tried to scoop out parts of the pile carefully to make sure they checked sections of trapped air where a survivor might be able to breathe.
The searchers were using dogs trained to search for live victims and others that can locate cadavers. If rescuers believe they have located an air pocket, both types of dogs will be called over to determine if anyone is nearby, said Captain Bill Monahan, head of the Los Angeles County Fire Department canine unit.
Monahan said he had been up for four days straight working on rescue efforts elsewhere during southern California’s record downpours, before he was called to La Conchita.
”It’s been four days of death and destruction,” he said.
Rescuers were given a break on Tuesday when the rains finally stopped. National Weather Service forecaster Stuart Seto said clear skies are expected to remain at least until the weekend.
Still, the damage was felt far from California.
Muddy rivers roared through towns along the Nevada-Arizona-Utah lines on Tuesday, flooding homes in the Nevada resort town of Mesquite and forcing the evacuation of about 100 people in nearby Overton.
Seven of Arizona’s 15 counties have declared states of emergency to qualify for clean-up funding and aid, with the hardest hit in the north-western tip of the state and central regions.
Officials were testing wells in the Beaver Dam area to make sure none were contaminated when a sewage plant that serves the community of 1 500 was damaged by flood waters. About 14 houses were destroyed or washed away.
National Guard helicopters were called in to airlift residents in two areas of southern Utah’s Washington County that were stranded by washed-out bridges and roads. The county was declared a state disaster area.
”It’s a situation that one must see to believe,” Governor Jon Huntsman said. ”Property has been lost, homes have been lost, families have been relocated.” — Sapa-AP
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