Search resumes for missing after Alaska landslide leaves 3 dead
WRANGELL, Alaska — Searchers looking for three people who remain missing after a massive landslide that killed three others and injured a fourth have changed their strategy from holding an active search to a reactive search that will involve methodically clearing the highway, officials said Thursday.
“During active search periods we have searchers in the field meticulously looking for missing persons,” Austin McDaniel, a spokesperson with the Alaska Department of Public Safety, told the Associated Press. “During reactive searches, search teams are not actively in the field but will react to new information and then actively search that area supported by the new information.”
Since Monday night’s slide, officials have inspected the site with drones, helicopters and planes while teams using detection dogs and sonar covered the ground and water, but the three people — one adult and two juveniles — remain missing, McDaniel said.
The slide churned up the earth from near the top of the mountain down to the ocean, tearing down a wide swath of evergreen trees and burying a highway in the island community of Wrangell, about 155 miles south of Juneau. Rescue crews found the body of a girl Monday night and the bodies of two adults late Tuesday.
Around 54 homes are cut off from town by the landslide, and roughly 35 to 45 people have chosen to stay in that area, interim borough manager Mason Villarma said. Boats are being used to provide supplies, including food, fuel and water, and prescription medications to those residents. Given the geography of the island — with the town at the northern point and houses along a 13-mile stretch of paved road — currently “the ocean is our only access to those residences,” he said.
The slide — estimated to be 450 feet wide — occurred during rain and a windstorm. Wrangell received about 2 inches of rain from early Monday until late evening, with wind gusts up to 60 mph at higher elevations, said Aaron Jacobs, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Juneau.