Oso landslide lawsuit settled: Could climate change affect future cases?

Victims' families and survivors of the 2014 landslide in Oso, Wash. reached settlements worth $60 million. More complicated cases involving links to climate change may be on the horizon, say experts.

|
Ted S. Warren/AP
In this March 24, 2014, file photo, the massive mudslide that killed 43 people in the community of Oso, Wash., is viewed from the air.

A Washington timber company agreed to pay $10 million on Monday to survivors and families of victims of a 2014 landslide in Oso, northeast of Seattle, adding to a separate $50 million settlement with the state one day earlier.

Forty-three people died in the landslide, the deadliest in US history. The families blame logging on the slope above where the slide happened, saying that the timber company, Grandy Lake Forest Associates LLC, cut down more trees than permitted in 2004, making the slope more prone to collapse, according to the Wall Street Journal. The plaintiffs also cited the Washington Department of Natural Resources’ decision to build a retaining wall at the base of an unstable hill, while failing to inform nearby residents of the risk posed by landslides. Both the company and the state deny wrongdoing.

Environmental legal experts say that as the effects of climate change make such disasters more likely, governments may be increasingly susceptible to lawsuits if they don’t take changing conditions into account in their planning.

In an April report on government liability and climate change, executive director of the Association of State Wetland Managers Jon Kusler noted that no US government agency had yet been found liable for damages by failing to incorporate the effects of climate change into its programs or policies.

But in cases where floods, landslides and other events are found to be directly responsible for damages to private property, he wrote, courts are increasingly holding governments liable. With broad consensus among scientists that climate change would exacerbate such catastrophes, successful lawsuits brought against governments that don’t properly foresee potential damages related to the effects of climate change “may be expected in the coming years.” And as scientists get better at modeling and monitoring the effects of climate change, “climate-related natural hazards will be increasingly quantified, foreseeable and predictable”.

Lawsuits that blame landslides on the state, or the activity of neighbors and nearby companies, tend to be expensive cases to mount, according to legal experts. And they’re generally not easy to argue, since they often involve uncontrollable natural factors, like an increase in precipitation leading up to the event.

“To try to disprove that rain caused it and to try to prove there's some other contributing cause is difficult,” said Los Angeles lawyer Kenneth Chiate, who represented over 100 clients in one 1983 case, in a 2005 interview with the Los Angeles Times.

One claim in the Oso case has yet to be resolved: the plaintiffs’ appeal of an earlier ruling that dismissed the county government from the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, Dayn Brunner, whose sister Summer Raffo was killed as she drove to work along a highway that was swallowed up by the Oso landslide, told the Associated Press that some of the money from the settlement would go toward erecting a permanent memorial on the site.

“My No. 1 priority was to ensure my sister’s legacy lived on,” he said. “Today was an affirmation of that.”

In accepting the settlement, Judge Roger Rogoff said that for the victims, “no legal settlement … or anything that happens in a courtroom could ever replace what you have lost,” according to the Seattle Times.

“But I hope it brings some sense of closure,” he added.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Oso landslide lawsuit settled: Could climate change affect future cases?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/1011/Oso-landslide-lawsuit-settled-Could-climate-change-affect-future-cases
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe