Footage released of US mudslide rescue 
 
 Updated: 04:41, Thursday March 27, 2014 
 
 Dramatic footage has been released of the moment a four-year-old boy was rescued from the mudslide in Washington state that has left at least 24 people dead. 
 
 Jacob Spillers is seen being attended to by rescuers who have flown in on a helicopter just hours after thousands of tons of mud flattened dozens of houses in Oso. 
 
 He was one of only two people in his family to survive after his house took a direct hit. 
 
 His stepbrother, father and two other siblings are still missing. His mother who was not at the house and survived. 
 
 Sixteen people were confirmed dead on Tuesday. Emergency services said overnight that they had located what they thought was another eight bodies, increasing the death toll. 
 
 As many as 176 others are missing but authorities do not know whether they are people who have not been in touch, or are under the debris. 
 
 Residents of a nearby town of Darrington have now been allowed to help emergency services comb through the wreckage. 
 
 Emergency workers have been using dogs and specialist electronic equipment to try to find survivors and bodies. 
 
 Their search has been hampered by the weather and the sheer amount of debris, much of which can only be removed by hand, in one of the worst such disasters in the United States. 
 
 'Unfortunately, we did not find any signs of life today, we didn't locate anybody alive, so that's the disappointing part,' Snohomish County fire district chief Travis Hots said. 
 
 He said the emergency operation was still focused on finding survivors as well as recovering bodies. 
 
 'We haven't lost hope that there's a possibility that we can find someone,' he said. 
 
 The mudslide smashed through the small community, about 55 miles (90km) north of Seattle, on Saturday morning. 
 
 Mr Hots said some 50 more searchers had been brought in to sift through the disaster zone in hopes of a miracle. 
 
 'This makes up over 200 responders that are here on site working very hard to locate victims and hopefully find somebody that is still alive. That is still our number-one priority out there,' he said. 
 
 Around 30 homes were destroyed and dozens more damaged as much of the riverside village was swept away. Eight people were injured. 
 
 The torrent of mud was unleashed after the hillside above the village became saturated by rain. 
 
 Reports suggest that authorities may have known about the potential for deadly landslides in the area. 
 
 A 2010 report commissioned by Snohomish County found that some neighbourhoods were at especially high risk because of the gradient of the hills and the soil type, according to the Seattle Times. 
 
 President Barack Obama has signed an emergency declaration ordering US government assistance to add to state and local relief efforts in the area. 
 
 'We hope for the best, but we recognise this is a tough situation,' he said. 
 
 The disaster already ranks as one of the deadliest landslides in recent US history. 
 
 In 2005, 10 people died when a hillside gave way and engulfed homes in La Conchita, California. ||||| Six more bodies were found Monday in a Washington town that was engulfed by mud when a hillside collapsed, raising the number of confirmed dead to 14, and authorities are chasing down a striking 176 reports of people missing. 
 
 The number of reports of missing people was up from 108 earlier in the day, though authorities cautioned that many of those could likely be false alarms and duplicates. 
 
 The search effort included firefighters and police officers, dogs and heavy equipment operators — even a hovercraft. 
 
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 The threat of a secondary landslide for a time hampered search-and-rescue efforts Monday afternoon. 
 
 Emergency management officials said some crews had been pulled off the disaster site in Oso, Wash., because of the danger. 
 
 "There is movement on the landslide," said state geologist Dave Norman. 
 
 State officials said geologist from several agencies were on the scene to monitor the hillside, but the slide area remained unsafe for recovery work before beginning again. 
 
 But the going was tough, officials said, with some areas “like quicksand” and others chunky hard clay hard to traverse and dig. 
 
 No survivors were found on Monday, said Snohomish County Fire District 21 Chief Travis Hots in a Monday evening news briefing. 
 
 Crews were going to continue overnight and into the morning, however. 
 
 “We’re looking in areas where there are most likely survivors,” Hots said, including structures and vehicles. 
 
 On the way to help is a 50-person specialty search-and-rescue team from the National Guard, said John Pennington, director of the Snohomish County Emergency Management Agency. 
 
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 The mudslide Saturday flattened dozens of homes in an area that was 4,400 feet wide by 4,400 feet long — shy of a square mile — leaving a jumble of muck and debris in its wake. 
 
 It peeled off a section of the hill that is 1,500 feet wide and 600 feet high. The concern was the land behind that so-called head-scarp might be unstable. 
 
 The mud and debris also dammed up a river, which was causing flooding upstream. The water was up to the eaves in seven homes, and officials were considering further evacuations. 
 
 President Barack Obama declared an emergency in Snohomish County, Wash., because of the mudslide and flooding. He ordered federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts and authorized the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts with "the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population."
– Hopes are fading for people still believed to be trapped under mud and debris after a massive landslide in Washington state. At least eight people have now been confirmed dead from the mudslide that destroyed dozens of houses in a neighborhood along the Stillaguamish River, the Seattle Times reports. At least a dozen people are still missing, but rescue workers say they didn't see or hear any signs of life after working throughout the day. But despite the lack of signs of life in the debris field, the operation is still in "search and rescue mode," a local fire chief says. "It has not gone to a recovery mode at this time." Rescuers had to pull back early yesterday until geologists told them it was safe to return, the AP reports. "We have this huge square-mile mudflow that's basically like quicksand," the fire chief says. At least eight people were injured in the slide Saturday morning, which officials describe as a "a big wall of mud and debris" caused by ground made unstable by recent rainfall.