Oso Fire Chief Willy Harper was about to mow his lawn the morning of the slide when he got a call about something in the road. He told his wife he’d be right back.
“And I came over the hill … and you couldn’t really tell what was going on,” Harper said. “It was just a tarp in the road and it kind of looked like some mud. It wasn’t registering that I couldn’t see what wasn’t there, or what used to be there. There were a couple of civilians parked, and we get out and we’re trying to figure out what’s going on and then all of a sudden we hear somebody call out from the mud, ‘Hey, there’s a baby in here.'”
The civilians ran in. Harper and two other Oso firefighters followed. “It was really weird to walk out there because it was like soup,” Harper said. “You’d take a step and you’d think it was solid and then you’d sink up to your arm pits and dig yourself out,” Willy said.