Savior from destruction

The landslide could have hit at any minute.

In the path of danger, knowing that disaster was imminent, Jason Hinkle and his crew rapidly dug a relief ditch that they hoped would save Woodson, a small western Oregon city, from disaster.

Soon after, the landslide came. Luckily, the town had already been evacuated–Hinkle had done his job.

Then, a giant wave of water, mud and debris crashed down the hill, covering many parts of the small town.

“It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in my life,” Hinkle said.

A PSU alumnus who graduated in 2003 with a master’s degree in geology, Hinkle is now in his seventh year at the Oregon Department of Forestry. As a geotechnical specialist he assesses landslide hazard risks involved with proposed forest work and their affects on natural resources and public safety.

To the average person, the work might sound technical, but occasionally–as in the recent Woodson landslide–his work can make the difference between life and death.

The storm

The landslide disaster happened in December, and was the result of a large storm that had been pounding northwest Oregon for days. An Astoria-based weather station estimated that rainfall on Dec. 2 was 2.3 inches–over 700 percent more than the average rainfall for that day.

Hinkle was called into Woodson, which is about 75 miles northwest of Portland, after a series of landslides, triggered by the storm, plugged up the drain along Highway 30 with debris.

“Essentially it became a dam. An earthen dam,” Hinkle said.

With the drain stopped up, water pooled behind the road, creating a 40 to 50-foot deep, 200-foot long makeshift lake. The highway was in danger of collapsing, an event that would put Woodson, which rests downhill from the highway, in great danger.

The man for the job

A homeowner patrolling his land at the top ridge by the highway discovered the water pooling up and notified his down-slope neighbors. The Department of Forestry was called, and after assessment, Hinkle was called to the job.

On Dec. 10, Hinkle and fellow Department of Forestry geotechnician Susan Shaw drove to Woodson to assess the risk of the road failing. The property owners were going to bring equipment into the area and clear out the debris that afternoon, but they were unsuccessful.

When the sun set that Monday night, the situation along Highway 30 was bleak.

Evacuation comes in the nick of time

The next morning, at about 4:30 a.m., Hinkle headed back into Woodson. When he arrived on the site, things had gotten considerably worse. The road was failing and he knew something had to be done.

Hinkle rushed to call the local forestry office and have the sheriff evacuate the area. He and his colleagues then got to work digging a relief ditch to try to lower the water level behind the road.

“It became a race against time,” Hinkle said. “Unfortunately the road continued to fail.”

Concerned about the families below, Hinkle called the local office again to confirm that the sheriff had evacuated the area. When he found out an evacuation was not made, Hinkle and others around him acted swiftly.

“I drove down to the bottom. A bunch of us showed up at the same time,” he said.

Hinkle, other department of forestry employees, the sheriff and a local fire district member ran to houses and alerted homeowners.

“I knocked on this one door and was like, ‘Hey, you got to go,'” said Hinkle. “He didn’t mess around. He got his kids and left.”

By this point, specialists from the Oregon Department of Transportation had arrived and, along with Hinkle, closed Highway 30.

Convinced that the road could fail at any moment, Hinkle continued to dig, being careful not to redirect the massive amount of water in another direction.

Disaster strikes

About an hour and a half later, the road finally failed, unleashing the veritable lake of water and debris across the highway and down onto the home and businesses below.

“The whole thing started to move,” said Hinkle, who joined others in shouting at an excavator to back up so they wouldn’t be washed down the ridge.

Hinkle estimated that the slide, traveling at 30 to 40 miles per hour, took about two or three minutes to make it from the highway to Woodson.

Four houses, one restaurant, the highway and a railroad were all buried in mud.

Lives could have been lost in the disaster if Hinkle and his crew did not act when they did, said PSU Geology Professor Scott Burns, who was Hinkle’s former advisor and was at the post-disaster scene.

“[Hinkle] went way beyond the call of duty-saving lives and endangering his life,” he said.

Some, like Burns, may call him a hero, but Hinkle is more modest, saying that all he did was knock on some doors. While the landslide may have looked thrilling at first, the image of the rushing wave of debris and mud, and the impact it had on the townsfolk of Woodson, haunted him.

“It was really too much,” Hinkle said, “If I could make the whole thing go away, I would in a heartbeat. When I went down to the bottom and saw what had happened… I think I was in shell shock for the rest of the day.”

To learn more

A video of the disaster, shot by Hinkle, can be viewed at: www.kgw.com/video/raw-index.html?nvid=200603, though he joked about the quality: “It’s kind of like Bigfoot footage, you know? It’s pretty crazy.”

A presentation prepared by Bill Burns, another PSU geology alumni, which explains in detail what happened in Woodson and what we can learn from it is available at: www.oregongeology.com