Peninsula Daily News news sources
CLINTON — A landslide that has been creeping off a bluff over Brighton Beach in Clinton on Whidbey Island has taken a fourth house.
The homes were on Campers Row, a community along Puget Sound accessible only by a private walkway.
A landslide smashed through a home on the beach on Friday, according to the South Whidbey Record.
In late February, a rush of mud, clay, water, trees and brush slid from the 200-foot high bluff and down toward Puget Sound, wrecking one Campers Row structure and filling another with sediment, the Record said.
Both homes were owned by Frances Wood, who writes a birding column for the South Whidbey Record, a sister newspaper of the Peninsula Daily News.
“I haven’t dared go up there,” Wood told the Record.
“There’s been such a long history of family times there it’s frankly hard to imagine that that’s gone.”
A slide in December had destroyed another home on the beach.
No one has been hurt in the slides, the newspaper said.
Mud has accumulated high enough to reach the bluffside eaves of the first story of the northern-most cabin.
One neighbor, Peter Van Giesen, has regularly monitored the growth and measured it at six inches per day, the Record said.
“This whole area is subject to slides,” Bill Oakes, Island County Public Works director, told the Record.
“This is a steep, unstable bluff. When we get high groundwater, it tends to destabilize this. It’s all mapped as geohazard.”
Residents of the area and local authorities have hired geologists to analyze the continuously eroding hillside.
A huge landslide struck near Coupeville on Whidbey Island in March 2013.
The landslide, which destroyed one home and left more than a dozen others cut off from access by road, sent the equivalent of 40,000 dump-truck loads of earth — about 200,000 cubic yards — heaving toward Puget Sound.