‘It never gets easier’ for man who lost sister in Oso mudslide

Dayn Brunner remembers a phone call from his mother on March 22, 2014 that changed his life forever.

“She called me and said ‘Hey, what’s going on with the road?’ I said I hadn’t heard anything and she said ‘I heard there was a mudslide on Route 530.”

Slides were nothing new for folks living along 530 and normally they were cleared by the state Department of Transportation in a matter of hours.

Photos: Oso one year later

When she called Dayn again, there was more urgency.

“She said my sister, Summer, went to shoe a horse and she couldn’t reach her.”

Brunner roused his sons, Riley and Zach, and headed toward Skaglund Hill on Highway 530. They knew Summer was driving her blue Subaru WRX to a farrier job. She was never late to work.

But the boys were stopped at a roadblock at Hazel Pond, short of the slide.

His mother called once more, now frantic.

“I said, ‘Mom, I don’t have any new information about the mudslide’ and she started breaking down saying ‘Summer is in it. I know she’s in it. I can’t reach her. You have to go in there and get her. Get your sister out!'”

Dayn and his sons talked their way past law enforcement at the last roadblock to reach the scene. They were some of the only people walking on the slide that first day, witnessing the initial horror and devastation where Steelhead Haven, a community of 50 homes, used to be.

“It was bad. It was so soupy that you would be just walking along and part was solid and then just – bam- you’re up to your chest in mud.”

They knew Summer’s car had been knocked off the highway by the wall of mud that came crashing down the hillside. They began struggling along through the debris, looking for any sign of Summer’s car.

“We were picking through cars, walking over bodies, and looking for survivors. We could hear people. We could hear moaning and people screaming and stuff,” Dayn said with a trembling voice. “We tried to reach them, but we couldn’t.”

They worked as long as daylight lasted, but had to turn back. The Stillaguamish River was backing up, and saturated dirt as thick as quicksand threatened to swallow them while they searched.

Dayn called his mother and told her to keep hope alive.

“I told her Summer is tough. If anyone could survive this, it’s her. She was in her car. She’s found an air pocket and she’s waiting for me to come get her. If it took me the rest of my life to find her, I would do it.”

The next days were dangerous as well, but locals from Darrington and Oso simply refused to leave their loved ones behind.

Snohomish County Helicopter Rescue pulled some survivors out during those first critical hours after the mudslide. But for three days, family members like Dayn and his sons were on their own, searching the pile under threat of arrest from agencies still wary of the unstable terrain and threat of a secondary slide.

To avoid State Patrol barricades, local searchers followed an old power line access road to the south of the slide. They used bolt cutters on a couple of private gates to get through and get back to work in the debris field, finding victims as they went.

“They were so mangled and you couldn’t recognize them,” Dayn said. “We’d walk some more and found dead animals and more bodies. We just kept digging and searching.”

Dayn said it’s hard to remember feeling anything. Days later his sister was still missing and he was in shock.

“You get numb and the adrenaline kicks in and you know you just have to do this,” he said.

FEMA organized official search crews starting on the fourth day but Dayn, his son Riley, and the other local volunteers were frustrated as their pace slowed.

On day five, he got another fateful call.

Dayn was preparing to board a hovercraft to search the flooded river for cars when a friend searching the pile called him. Crews had turned up a blue Subaru.

Heavy rains on Tuesday had uncovered Summer’s car.

“I grabbed my son and said ‘Are you ready?’ And he said, ‘Dad I’ve been ready for five days.’ He started digging and the FEMA guy comes over and says ‘If you don’t want anyone else here, you just say the word.’ I looked around me and they were all guys who been here the first three days and they’d left their assigned digging areas to come over to us. I told the FEMA guy ‘I want every one of these people here.'”

Dayn, his son Riley, and a friend uncovered Summer.

“She was still sitting in the driver’s seat. The roof was gone, the windshield was basically down in her lap and there was soft mud everywhere. Everywhere. Both of her hands were on the steering wheel and her foot was on the gas pedal. She never saw it coming.”

Recovery workers stopped nearby, waiting for more family members to arrive, including Summer’s husband, Jason.

A National Guard helicopter crew member rappelled down to take her out.

“And there she went,” remembers Dayn. “I thought she’s going to be mad. It took me five days to find her and she then had to fly and she’s afraid of heights. But I found her. I found her.”

Today, Dayn is part of a team developing a memorial on the ground where his family, friends, and neighbors lost their lives.

Snohomish County bought 14 acres of Stillaguamish Valley land for a permanent commemorative site.

Driving through the site Dayn said, “We don’t have anything set in stone yet, but the idea is to lay out a walkway path through that area and have a bench set up for every victim.”

He said folks in Darrington and Oso are fiercely protective of the space.

“It’s hard because this is sacred ground. This is a burial ground, this is a cemetery, and this is something that we want left alone. We don’t want it to be a tourist attraction. We don’t need to be made a mockery of.”

Meanwhile, local volunteers like Dayn take pride in the results of an independent state commission that examined the emergency response to the March 22 slide. The report praised the Darrington and Oso loggers’ “innovation, adaptation, and sheer willpower” in the face of disaster.

“We knew what we were doing,” Dayn said. “Getting the compliments from there was phenomenal. This disaster, this community … have changed the way we do things because it worked.”

Each of the 43 trees planted along the rebuilt stretch of Highway 530 have been decorated and personalized to represent the souls swept away when the earth swallowed this part of the valley.

Summer’s tree stands next to yellow daffodils.

Dayn said, “I always look over to the right-hand side going down and then the left-hand side going up at where she was found. I drive by here almost every day and every day it never gets easier.”