State accused of Oso landslide cover-up

SEATTLE — Lawyers for victims and family members in the deadly 2014 landslide in Washington state have accused state lawyers of orchestrating a fraud to hide the truth by deleting emails between defence-expert witnesses.

In a motion filed Tuesday, the lawyers say the state has spent more than $3 million US on developing the opinions of its sevenperson expert team.

They claim that undertaking, however, was started with an agreement approved by the state attorney general to destroy emails and deceive the public about the state’s actions.

The plaintiffs say they obtained some of the emails sent among the state’s expert witnesses that were mistakenly spared from deletion. They allege the emails show that the experts were “constantly shifting their story in service of the state’s defence.”

“What we will never know is the true depth of this deceit, because the vast majority of emails were destroyed and will never see the light of day,” the lawyers wrote.

A total of 43 people were killed in the March 22, 2014, slide in Oso, about 100 kilometres northeast of Seattle.

The plaintiffs are requesting that Judge Roger Rogoff impose sanctions ranging from instructing a future jury to draw a “negative inference” from the email deletions to entering a liability judgment against the state.

The attorney general’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, the Seattle Times reported Tuesday.

The civil lawsuit set for trial this fall is expected to involve one of the largest tort claims in Washington history with the state, as well as Snohomish County and Grandy Lake Forest Associates, as defendants.