Victims often struggle silently, reluctant to seek help

OSO — On March 13, LoAnna Langton sorted through the photographs she’d recovered from the home she lost one year ago.

The house she and her family lived in was flooded by the North Fork Stillaguamish River after it was blocked by a mudslide on March 22, 2014.

“Today was the first day that I’d decided I was ready to go through those pictures,” she said.

Many of the photos they salvaged were so damaged they were unrecognizable.

“They’re just blurs that used to be childhood memories,” she said.

The slide wiped out the Steelhead Haven neighborhood, killing 43 people and destroying dozens of homes.

The mud flow stopped short of the Langtons’ rental house. LoAnna escaped with their four children. Her husband, Kris Langton, who was at work, rushed back and ended up wading through the mud to get to them, helping rescue survivors along the way. He later was recognized as an American Red Cross Real Hero for his actions that day, which saved the lives of three people caught in the slide.

A year after the slide, the Langtons still struggle.

But like many of those whose lives were forever changed by the slide, the Langtons have done so privately, reluctant to ask for help.

Assistance is still available for those who lost homes or family members one year ago, as well as for emergency workers who pulled the wounded and the dead out of the mud, for children who lost classmates, and anyone else still dealing with trauma from the biggest natural disaster in Snohomish County’s recorded history.

The biggest challenge faced by the case managers, social workers and nonprofits is often making that initial contact with someone in need.

The residents of the Stillaguamish valley have long had an independent streak, borne out if its relative remoteness and its history as a rural logging and agricultural community.

“There’s a lot of history in Oso and a lot of self-reliance,” said Cherene Graber, who chairs the Relief Committee at the Oso Community Chapel, which has raised about $401,000 in donations to support the community in the past year, and distributed about 85 percent of it.

“It’s hard for those to come forward, especially in the devastation that the first responders saw,” Graber said.

The Langtons received some emergency aid in the first days after the slide, initially staying at the Red Cross shelter in the Darrington Community Center.

But the family of seven — four children and a great-aunt who now lives with them — didn’t find permanent housing until November, when they rented a house outside Arlington.

The house had no heat except for a wood stove, and they had no money to buy fuel. Kris Langton, a carpenter, has struggled to find enough work, and finally in December they asked for help.

“It was 17 degrees and it was cold,” LoAnna Langton said.

“It’s been very hard and embarrassing,” she added. “You don’t want to go and be like, ‘Hey, give me a handout.’ ”

A case manager took their plea to the Red Cross, which provided money for more wood, clothes and food, as well as a new chain saw for her husband so he could cut more firewood, as well as an electric space heater.

In doing so, the Langtons benefitted from a formal system for helping those affected by the mudslide that has been in place since last year.

One-stop shopping

The system is based on the work of two disaster case managers, who maintain contacts with people with ongoing needs.

While Snohomish County has “navigators” helping residents of the valley with government or other public assistance, the case managers, hired by the Salvation Army with funds provided by the Red Cross and United Way, help those affected by the slide obtain funds or other necessities from the pool of private charitable donations.*

The case managers bring those needs that require financial support, such as mortgage payments, medical bills or buying new furniture, to what is called the Unmet Needs Group.

The group is a coalition of local churches, social service agencies, community groups and large charities that meets weekly in Oso. They assess each request on its merits and decide how to provide the necessary funds.

It is through the Unmet Needs Group much of the remainder of the $9.5 million in relief money raised to date by the larger charities is disbursed into the community.

The system makes it akin to a one-stop clearing house for the clients, said Shaun Jones, the disaster services director for the Salvation Army’s Northwest Division, which pays for the two case managers to handle about 45 active cases.

“That way the client doesn’t have to go to 10 different agencies,” Jones said.

The fact that the need for assistance hasn’t gone away has become more apparent as the one-year mark of the slide approaches.

“We thought we were meeting immediate needs, but now some people are coming forward as we’re getting closer” to that date, said Wyonne Perrault, the executive director of North Counties Family Services in Darrington, one of the front-line social service agencies providing assistance to individuals and families.

That level of collaboration has been unprecedented elsewhere in the country, and it’s been part of the reason why so many people have been reached, said Chuck Morrison, executive director of the American Red Cross of Snohomish County.

“At this point 100 percent of the unmet needs have been met” by one of the members of the group, Morrison said.

But there are likely still stragglers who haven’t made that initial step to connect with service providers. The Langtons were once among them, and it took many months before they asked for help.

Those working in the valley point to a complex mixture of issues at work among the survivors and larger community, ranging from their resilience and independence, to survivor’s guilt and the embarrassment of being put into a position to have to ask for help.

There is an informal gradation of suffering in the valley’s culture, where one’s level of need is weighed against that of a neighbor’s, and that in turn plays a role in how people are coping with the aftermath of a tragedy that affected thousands of lives.

Put another way: If their neighbor has it worse, seeking help for themselves just doesn’t seem right.

Jones, Morrison and others all acknowledge that some people might still be overlooked, either by choice or because they never reached out to anyone in the first place.

“We don’t have a list of everybody who was affected. I don’t think anybody has a full list,” Jones said.

“It becomes a choice, ultimately, if they want to engage or not,” Jones added.

Morrison said he has heard of people who have barely left their homes since the slide, or who still turn away offers of help, despite promises of anonymity and confidential treatment of their cases.

Reaching out to a shut-in is difficult.

“Do we have the right to go into those homes before they come to us?” Perrault asked. “The case managers have made valiant efforts to find them. We just found another person (a week ago) Friday.”

Ongoing needs

Making that initial contact for an immediate need — whether it’s gas money, groceries or something else — provides an open door to provide more long-term needs, Perrault said.

“At some point there might even be a need that they’re not seeing,” she said.

Some people are still refusing to drive down Highway 530 through the slide zone, cutting themselves off from the rest of the county as if the road had never been rebuilt.

“I’m up and down that road all the time,” Perrault said. “It reminds me every day that we are grateful, and that we still have work to do.”

Housing has been one ongoing need, so much so that the Cascade Valley Hospital Foundation, one of the nonprofits that has been distributing relief money, announced in October it would focus almost exclusively on housing needs going forward.

The foundation said this month that 17 families have used housing assistance money for rent, mortgage payments and even for a down payment on a new home.

Another issue has come to the forefront as the one-year mark of the mudslide approaches.

“There’s also a tremendous need we see for behavioral and mental health going forward,” the Red Cross’ Morrison said.

That’s not just for survivors. “Many of them were people who volunteered on the pile and saw things no one should ever see,” he said.

Last week while she was sorting photographs, LoAnna Langton said that she and her family were “getting by” mentally and emotionally, despite being nearly broke.

“It’s awful hard to ask for help here, because we didn’t lose anybody,” she said. “We’re just grateful to be alive. So many of our neighbors aren’t here, trying to rebuild their lives.”

Chris Winters: 425-374-4165; cwinters@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @Chris_At_Herald.

Help still available for needs

Financial and other assistance is still available through the case management system set up to help those affected by the Oso mudslide. To speak to a case manager, call either 425-219-0675 or 360-631-2994.

Clarification, March 23, 2015: The Red Cross and United Way provide the funds to hire case managers to help those affected by the Oso mudslide. Their contribution was omitted from an earlier version of this story.