Residents: Slide was "like a glacier" inching forward

NACHES, Yakima County — A day after being hit by a massive landslide, residents recalled a slow-motion mass of grinding rock and dirt.

"Like a glacier — rumbling and inching forward. A popping, grumbling sound," Ron Simmons said of the slide that lifted his house several feet and cracked his daughter's home next door.

On Monday, Simmons and his daughter, Rebecca, were cleaning out their homes and packing their belongings into the back of a pickup.

"This area has always been a little unstable but nothing like this," said Simmons, who grew up here — about 10 miles west of Naches and just west of the Woodshed Restaurant — and recalls another slide in 1956.

A similar refrain was echoed a quarter-mile or so to the west, on the other side of the landslide.

It was just a matter of time before something happened along that mountainside, said resident Frank Koch.

"We've been listening to it for about two weeks — cracks and little rocks sliding," he said. "It didn't just happen overnight."

Sunday's landslide, more than a quarter-mile wide and up to 40 feet thick, buried a swath of Highway 410 and covered the Naches River, sending a new channel of water into about 25 homes. It pushed up the original riverbed about 40 feet in places, leaving rainbow trout dying on the high rocks.

The slide destroyed two homes and damaged at least three others, including two owned by two generations of the Simmons family.

Damage to roads, homes and property could range up to $20 million, said Jim Hall, director of Yakima Valley Office of Emergency Management.

Officials have warned that rain, the river's new route, and stress fractures in the adjacent sections of the hill could cause additional landslides in the future.

Work on a detour around the slide area began today. The detour, which is intended only for local residents and emergency personnel, is expected to be completed by Friday.

It will take traffic around the slide on Nile Road, which roughly parallels Highway 410 through the Nile Valley.

The county plans a berm to protect Nile Road and stop the water from inundating the several homes along its south end.

While the state focuses on fixing the roadway, the county's "first and primary concern is to create a new channel," said Yakima County Commissioner Mike Leita, who toured the area for about four hours Monday morning.

"Half the river is going over the Nile Road," he said. "There is water running over and across the Nile Road, in some places three feet deep."