Oso Disaster Pushes Dogs, and Handlers, To Their Limits

July 20, 2013

Gray and black mud coats everything. The mud is 70 feet deep in places, shot through with huge shattered evergreens, splintered houses and outbuildings, twisted cars-pushed together by the force of the slide. A river has backed up and flooded parts of that mile-square pile. Scattered somewhere beneath it are the still missing and dead. And it keeps raining.

 

The search continues in that purgatory, created almost two weeks ago when part of a mountain sheared off and roared to the bottom of a river valley in Oso, Washington. It will probably go on for weeks….