Stunning video emerged Wednesday of a 4-year-old boy plucked from the muck by a helicopter rescue team in the aftermath of the devastating mudslide that pulverized a rural community in Washington. 
 
 Jacob Spillers was saved Saturday after being trapped in the mud that destroyed dozens of homes and killed at least 16 people. Rescuers believe they have also spotted the bodies of eight victims of the Saturday landslide. 
 
 The boy was at home with his father, Billy Spillers, and three siblings when the mudslide tore through Oso, a town 55 miles northeast of Seattle. Jacob is the only known survivor of the group. 
 
 Jacob Spillers, 4, was rescued from the mudslide in Oso, Wash., on Saturday. This photo was taken on July 7, 2012. 
 
 Up to 176 people remain missing in the wake of the mud wave. 
 
 Search crews continued the grim task of rescue and recovery Wednesday, wading through the mess of earth, trees, ice and foul waste water as hopes dimmed of finding survivors. Emergency workers used search dogs, bulldozers and bare hands to slog through the square-mile debris field. 
 
 (L-R): Kaylee Spillers, baby Brooke Spillers, Jacob Spillers (wearing blue), Jovon Spillers, father Billy Spillers, mother Jonielle Spillers. Up until Saturday, only Jacob and Jonielle were known to be safe after Saturday's mudslide in Washington. Snohomish County Helicopter Rescue Team The 4-year-old boy, Jacob Spillers, was trapped in the mud after the landslide destroyed his family’s Oso home on Saturday. Central Pierce Fire and Rescue The little boy survived the deadly disaster, but authorities were still searching for his father and three siblings. Marcus Yam/AP Authorities said they are searching for up to 176 people who have been missing since the mudslide swept through the rural town about 55 miles northeast of Seattle on Saturday. Previous Next 
 
 
 
 
 
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 Authorities said some victims may be left entombed in the treacherous terrain because attempts to recover every body would be dangerous. 
 
 With News Wire Services 
 
 jkemp@nydailynews.com ||||| 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. ||||| Originally published March 25, 2014 at 11:50 AM | Page modified March 26, 2014 at 11:18 AM 
 
 Rescuers expanded their search Tuesday and found additional bodies in the muck of a massive mudslide in Snohomish County. 
 
 Use an interactive tool to see the landslide’s deadly path. 
 
 Interactive map: A detailed view of the neighborhood hit by the landslide 
 
 Read about the lives of the victims. 
 
 Use an interactive to see how, even as warnings mounted, homes kept being built in slide-prone Steelhead Haven. 
 
 A collection of stories and visuals about the disaster, why it may have happened and the people it affected. 
 
 On a day with no shortage of grim news, the family of Navy Cmdr. L. John Regelbrugge III found the smallest measure of solace amid the wreckage of what four days ago was a thriving community. 
 
 Two of Regelbrugge’s brothers, joining in Tuesday’s expanded search for survivors of the Oso-area mudslide, found the body of the 32-year Navy veteran on his shattered property on Steelhead Drive, said his sister-in-law, Jackie Leighton of Vacaville, Calif. 
 
 “His brother Greg put a work shirt over him. They said he had massive injuries, so at least he didn’t suffer,” Leighton said. 
 
 The body of Regelbrugge’s wife, Kris, a mother of five, was found later. 
 
 Both were among the victims that officials said were found Tuesday during a difficult search that can no longer be labeled anything but a recovery. Chief Travis Hots of Snohomish County Fire Districts 21/22 said two more bodies were recovered Tuesday, bringing the official death toll to 16. 
 
 But Hots said searchers believe they have located eight more bodies that have not been recovered. 
 
 John Pennington, the county’s emergency-management director, said during a morning briefing that he remained hopeful for a miracle and the possibility a survivor may be found. But he also pointed out that a state mortuary-assistance team had been called in to assist. 
 
 “I think that speaks for itself,” Pennington said. 
 
 The number of those unaccounted for remains at 176, a figure officials are still trying to ratchet downward by verifying names, Pennington said. 
 
 He said three Snohomish County sheriff’s deputies who specialize in missing persons are helping sort through the names. He hoped to have a more accurate number Wednesday. 
 
 For a community mindful that no survivors have been found since the first few hours after Saturday’s mudslide, the bad news is unrelenting. 
 
 “We all grew up here. We all spent 99 percent of our life here, or more. It’s devastating. It’s just devastating,” said Teresa Hathaway, 55, of Arlington. 
 
 Guard, FEMA help 
 
 Tuesday’s search was conducted amid worsening weather conditions, but was aided by the arrival of teams from the Washington Army National Guard and Federal Emergency Management Agency. 
 
 Dozens spent the day carefully maneuvering through shattered trees and the unrecognizable debris of homes and twisted propane tanks, searching with specially trained dogs and a variety of technologies such as sonar. 
 
 “It’s almost like walking in ice in places,” Hots said of the difficult terrain. 
 
 Describing a visit to the mudslide, the veteran firefighter said the damage was worse than he imagined. 
 
 He said he initially believed that people who had been swallowed by the slide while driving on Highway 530 would be buried in their cars and could be rescued. But those “vehicles are like twisted and tore up in pieces. ... It’s just amazing, the magnitude of what this slide has done,” Hots said. 
 
 Officials stationed in Darrington augmented their search teams Tuesday with community volunteers eager to help in any way they could. Many had already risked arrest by conducting unauthorized searches in the days after the hillside gave way and buried a community in up to 20 feet of mud and debris. 
 
 Gov. Jay Inslee joined a morning meeting of the Darrington Fire District with the new volunteers, saying afterward that “this remains an aggressive rescue effort.” 
 
 Officials did have good news for those in Darrington, east of where the slide took place: Phone and Internet services were restored and a second road into town, the Mountain Loop Highway, should open Thursday. 
 
 “Awful” noise 
 
 The Sheriff’s Office released recordings of the 911 calls reporting the slide and several hours of harrowing — even heartbreaking — exchanges between dispatchers and the first-responders on the scene. 
 
 The first was made by a woman who reported that water was running across Highway 530 and that there appeared to be a roof from a home or barn in the middle of the road. The calls grew increasingly frantic as the magnitude of the disaster comes into sharper focus. 
 
 One panicked woman called to say her neighbors’ houses were gone and that people were screaming for help. 
 
 Minutes later, a man called to say his neighbors’ home was buried, but that he could “hear them tapping underneath” the roof, which was sticking out of the muck. 
 
 That caller, Michael Lincoln, 50, and his wife were sleeping in Saturday when his son’s girlfriend, who had been on their front porch, pounded on the door, saying trees and mud were racing up their driveway along Highway 530. 
 
 Lincoln bolted awake and saw earth and vegetation rumbling toward his home. 
 
 “The noise was awful,” he told The Seattle Times on Tuesday. “She said it sounded like the end of the world. It was the sound of tens of thousands of things hitting each other.” 
 
 The river of debris slowed and finally settled. Lincoln ran out to the highway and sunk to his waist in mud. 
 
 His neighbor’s house was gone. Another home, owned by Linda McPherson and her husband, Gary “Mac” McPherson, had been split in two. Linda McPherson was killed. 
 
 Lincoln started yelling. Another man showed up and also started yelling. 
 
 They heard a voice in the rubble — Gary McPherson. They also heard him tapping. 
 
 Lincoln called 911. Others showed up to help. They ran and grabbed tools and started demolishing the McPhersons’ roof. 
 
 “We grabbed chain saws and axes and big crowbars,” he said. “We just started cutting through two-by-fours.” 
 
 Eventually they saw his fingers sticking up. 
 
 Emergency crews arrived in time to extricate McPherson, who was in his easy chair, trapped by a log. 
 
 The McPhersons’ daughter Kate McPherson said the couple had been drinking coffee, separated only by a living-room end table, when the slide shattered the house and shoved what remained about 150 feet. 
 
 Gary McPherson is recovering with relatives in Everett. 
 
 Watching carefully 
 
 Based on aerial photographs, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated the size of the slide at about 175 million cubic feet. 
 
 Engineers hope to install laser instruments to monitor the slide’s motions, but aren’t sure when that will be possible. 
 
 The slide is likely to keep creeping, and it’s tough to say whether another large slide could follow on its heels, said University of Washington landslide expert David Montgomery. 
 
 The massive slide relieved pressure within the slope and drained away the water that contributed to the failure, which lowers the risk of another large slide, he said. But at the same time, the failure creates new stresses and weakens the slope, which means more slides are not out of the question. 
 
 “It’s certainly something you would want to be watching very carefully,” Montgomery said. 
 
 The director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network discounted speculation that a tiny quake March 10 might have triggered the slide. 
 
 The quake measured 1.1 on the magnitude scale, said John Vidale. Very small quakes are hard to locate precisely, but the epicenter seems to have been about 2.5 miles underground and about a mile northeast of the slope that failed. 
 
 But the shaking from a 1.1 quake is so slight that even someone standing right on top of the epicenter probably wouldn’t have felt it, Vidale said. 
 
 “That earthquake wouldn’t have triggered anything.” 
 
 It’s even possible the seismic signal was caused not by a quake, but by the ground in the vicinity shifting before the slide, he added. 
 
 Seattle Times staff reporters Craig Welch, Sandi Doughton, Sara Jean Green, Mike Carter, Lynn Thompson and Jack Broom and Times news researcher Miyoko Wolf contributed to this story. Reporters Brian M. Rosenthal and John Higgins reported from Arlington. Reporter Alexa Vaughn reported from Darrington. 
 
 Want unlimited access to seattletimes.com? Subscribe now! ||||| Originally published April 9, 2014 at 5:33 PM | Page modified April 10, 2014 at 8:18 AM 
 
 A young mother who, though she was severely injured, survived the Oso mudslide, holding tight to her baby boy, describes the morning of the slide and the days that followed. 
 
 Use an interactive to see how, even as warnings mounted, homes kept being built in slide-prone Steelhead Haven. 
 
 A collection of stories and visuals about the disaster, why it may have happened and the people it affected. 
 
 Amanda Skorjanc heard a terrifying noise. The hill above her Oso home had just collapsed with a sound she will never forget. 
 
 At first, it sounded like a truck off a rumble strip, she said. 
 
 Then the lights at her home started to shake and blink. 
 
 “It was like a movie,” she said. “Houses were exploding. The next thing I see is my neighbor’s chimney coming into the front door.” 
 
 Skorjanc said that when she saw the wave of mud and debris heading toward her, she grabbed her 5-month-old son, Duke Suddarth, and held him to her tightly. 
 
 “That’s when it hit us,” she said. “I did not let that baby go for one second.” 
 
 Skorjanc remembers crying out to God: “Please save us.” 
 
 “It got dark around us, and it was throwing us all over the place,” she said. “It was very, very strong and very violent.” 
 
 Skorjanc, 25, a survivor of the massive Oso landslide on March 22, is still hospitalized at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center with multiple fractures to her eye, arm, leg and ankle. She talked for the first time Wednesday about surviving the disaster, which has killed at least 36 people. Ten others are missing. 
 
 Skorjanc said that when the mud and debris finally stopped moving, she found herself about 700 feet from her home in a group of trees. She and her son were caught in the pieces of a broken couch. “We were in this little cushioned pocket,” she said. “We had very little debris around us, a piece of ceiling and two-by-fours.” 
 
 Her legs were trapped from the knees down. “Here I am trapped with my child and this debris, and I can’t move and I can’t scream loud enough for help,” she said. “We live in Oso. It would take awhile for people to come.” 
 
 Skorjanc said she never lost consciousness. “I felt and heard and saw everything going on,” she said. 
 
 She tried to move her son to a spot where he would be more easily found, but it was impossible. “My arm was so broken, I couldn’t move it.” 
 
 Holding her son to her chest, she looked down at him and saw he was beginning to turn blue. 
 
 “I thought I was losing him,” she said. “I would say, ‘Stay with me Bud,’ and ask God not to take him in front of me.” It was an image, she said, that “will stay with me forever.” 
 
 Suddenly she heard someone yelling, asking if anyone was there. Her son began to cry. “I stuck my hand out where we had this little space. I told them he was 5 months old,” she said. 
 
 Amanda said it took about six people, using two chain saws, to free her from the couch. 
 
 A helicopter team from the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office initially took her to Cascade Valley Hospital in Arlington. 
 
 Her partner, Ty Suddarth, had hugged both her and their son goodbye that morning to run an errand in Darrington. He found out about the mudslide from his brother, who called to tell him “everything might be gone.” 
 
 Suddarth said he went to the Oso firehouse to await news and first got word Amanda had survived and later that Duke had been rescued. 
 
 Duke was taken to Harborview for treatment of a fractured skull and initially was listed in critical condition in intensive care. He made such steady progress that on April 1 he was transferred to Seattle Children’s hospital. His parents declined to be more specific about his condition and said they don’t know when he might be able to come home. 
 
 Skorjanc was transferred to Harborview in Seattle the day of the disaster. Her injuries have required six surgeries. 
 
 Her physician, Dr. Daphne Beingessner, said Wednesday that Skorjanc will need to use a wheelchair for about 10 weeks, and it could take a year for her to more fully recover. She also could face long-term problems with stiffness or arthritis, particularly in her fractured ankle. 
 
 The couple said they want to meet those who helped in the rescue. “There’s a lot of amazing people who stepped up,” she said. “They did something we can’t repay them for.” 
 
 She said she still struggles with her emotions every day and feels blessed that she, Suddarth and their son all survived. “At the same time, I feel guilty that I have my family and some don’t,” she said. 
 
 A basket near her hospital bed is stuffed with cards from well-wishers, many from people she doesn’t know. “I’m so overwhelmed with the love and support we get every day,” she said. “It helps. It really does. There are no words to say how grateful I am.” 
 
 Want unlimited access to seattletimes.com? Subscribe now! ||||| CLOSE Skip in Skip x Embed x Share Two additional bodies have been recovered, bringing the official death toll to 16 after the massive landslide in Washington state, according to Snohomish County officials. Authorities have also located eight more bodies. VPC 
 
 After the recovery of two more bodies, authorities raised the official death toll to 16. 
 
 This aerial photo taken Monday shows the massive mudslide that killed at least 14 people near Arlington, Wash. (Photo: Ted S. Warren, AP) 
 
 DARRINGTON, Wash. — People living in the tiny village destroyed by a mudslide knew there was a "high risk" of slides, a local official said Tuesday. 
 
 "This entire year we have pushed message after message that there's a high risk of landslides," said John Pennington, director of Snohomish County Emergency Management. "The dangers and the risks are known." 
 
 Snohomish County District 21 Fire Chief Travis Hots put the official death toll at 16 Tuesday night after the recovery of two more bodies, but he also said rescuers believe they've found another eight bodies. That discovery could bring the death toll to 24. 
 
 The bodies of a U.S. Navy commander and his wife were among those found in the aftermath, the man's father confirmed to NBC 7 in San Diego. 
 
 "He was a commander and would have made captain shortly too," John Regelbrugge Sr. told NBC 7 of his son, Cmdr. Leon "John" Regelbrugge III. 
 
 The couple has five children. 
 
 Scores more people were reported missing, but Pennington would not estimate how many bodies were still buried in the tons of mud and crumpled homes in Oso, about 55 miles northeast of Seattle. 
 
 Pennington acknowledged that the chance of finding survivors was small, but said the effort remained a rescue and recovery operation. 
 
 "I've said it before — I believe in miracles," he said. "I believe that people can survive these events." 
 
 As rescuers dealt with a difficult search, members of the public dealt with the tragedy in their own way. 
 
 About 200 people gathered in the cold and intermittent rain Tuesday night at a park in Arlington, Wash., to pray for the victims, family and friends of those lost in the Oso mudslide. 
 
 "Hug each other. Wipe away each other's tears " said Pastor Chad Blood with the Lifeway Foursquare Church in Arlington. 
 
 Even without that prodding, community members were taking care of each other through their pain, Blood said. 
 
 "People are just responding," he said. "When a need arises they just come and take care of it until we have to turn them away. I'm speechless at times, and so very proud of out community." 
 
 The collapse followed weeks of heavy rain. Still, Pennington had previously described the disaster as "completely unforeseen." The Seattle Times, however, reported this week that multiple geological reports had warned that the area was at risk. 
 
 "No language seems more prescient than what appears in a 1999 report filed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, warning of 'the potential for a large catastrophic failure,'" the Times reported. 
 
 Pennington said work had been done to mitigate slide risk since a much smaller slide struck the area in 2006 
 
 "If I'd had any idea that this was going to break that Saturday morning. ... Come on guys, we're very liberal at using reverse 911," he said Tuesday. "There's a reason that we have a very high success rate of mitigating disasters in our county. This is just one that hit us." 
 
 Pennington added that a small earthquake, measuring magnitude-1.1, had apparently struck behind the slide area on March 10. 
 
 Some people who lived in the area said flooding, not landslides, had been their primary concern. 
 
 "I wouldn't buy a house on the river myself, because rivers are unpredictable," said Marshia Armstrong, who lives in nearby Arlington. "Nobody could have predicted that whole huge slide. Another small slide, maybe, but nobody would have predicted that kind of movement." 
 
 Armstrong, a real estate agent, said one thing the media have been reporting on was the presence of "pistol butt" trees on the bluff. Those are trees under which the ground has shifted, so their trunks grow out and then up, bending like the butt of a pistol. 
 
 But in the rainy, wet Northwest "there are lots of places where the trees are growing up sideways," said Armstrong. The bluff that failed was "on the other side of the river from the houses, so they didn't think it was going to fall on their houses. They didn't think it was going to fill up the whole valley." 
 
 President Obama signed an emergency declaration ordering federal aid to the area. "I would just ask all Americans to send their thoughts and prayers to Washington state," Obama said, speaking from the Nuclear Security Summit at The Hague, Netherlands. 
 
 The landslide, which consumed a community of almost 50 homes, covers a 1-square-mile area. Darrington Mayor Dan Rankin thanked people for the outpouring of support Tuesday, adding that no additional volunteer help was needed. Federal, state and local responders were at the scene. 
 
 Eric Jonas of Lake Stevens was one of the people who showed up early to lend a hand. That could include the discovery of more victims. 
 
 "I've never had to deal with anything like that before, but they need help," Jonas said. "There could be some people alive out there." 
 
 Hopes of finding survivors were dim, however, as the rain and muddy, unstable terrain continued to slow rescue and recovery efforts. 
 
 Weather Channel meteorologist Jonathan Erdman said more than two inches of rain may fall over the next seven days from four separate weather systems. 
 
 "Our crews are up against an enormous challenge. It's like quicksand out there," Snohomish County Fire District 21 Chief Travis Hots said. 
 
 (Photo: Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY) 
 
 EARLIER: 14 dead, 176 missing in Washington landslide 
 
 Crews have to move extremely carefully as they work. "Some of my guys could only go 50 feet in five minutes," he said, because of the debris and danger of being sucked into the mud. 
 
 Hots said earth-moving equipment and "lots of people with local knowledge of that specific area" were providing valuable assistance in determining the most likely areas where people could be trapped. 
 
 Part of the hill had been logged in the 1980s, said University of Washington professor David Montgomery in Seattle. He studies geomorphology, how landscapes change through time. 
 
 "There's no way to know if that contributed to the slide," said Montgomery. "The surface of the Earth is constantly changing. We humans just don't always notice it, because it happens slowly. There had been landslides in that area going back hundreds of year, you can see it in the geography." 
 
 WEATHER: 'Extraordinary' precipitation a factor in Wash. mudslide 
 
 Janet Kim reports for King 5 News. Contributing: David Jackson, Doyle Rice, USA TODAY 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1gUas0z
– Positive news is hard to come by when it comes to the mudslide that wiped out a Washington state community, but footage is making the rounds today of a helicopter crew rescuing a 4-year-old boy from the muddy wreckage. Jacob Spillers was home with his two sisters, age 5 and 2, his stepfather, and his 13-year-old half-brother when the slide hit. The home was destroyed, and all were trapped inside, according to the Seattle Times. Everyone except Jacob is still missing; the boy escaped because he was on the second floor. "Jacob told me he got out when nobody else was able to get out," his half-brother's father says. Jacob's mother, however, is alive and well, because she wasn't home at the time. The footage was shot Saturday, the day the slide hit; no survivors have been found in the days since. Other heartbreaking tales from survivors: Gary "Mac" McPherson, 81, survived the landslide—even as it claimed his wife of 46 years, Linda, who was sitting right next to him, the LA Times reports. McPherson says he awoke sitting in the same chair, now crushed, with a ceiling beam across his lap, his house having been pushed 150 yards away. "He was able to dig a hole and see the sky," his daughter says. "The whole time, he was calling for my mom ... but she never responded." US Navy Cmdr. L. John Regelbrugge III's body was found by his two brothers yesterday morning, his sister-in-law tells the Seattle Times. The 32-year veteran's remains were alongside his dog's. "His brother Greg put a work shirt over him. They said he had massive injuries, so at least he didn't suffer." His wife was found a short time later.