Wrote a quick turn-around piece for NationalGeographic.com on the devastating mudslide that hit rural Washington State last Saturday.

While mudslides are fairly common in the US, and cause a lot of property damage, they rarely have this large a death toll: 25 dead so far, and 90 people still missing. This mudslide’s speed may have made it particularly deadly, and unfortunately, the size of the mudslide has made rescue operations challenging and is likely to hamper cleanup efforts.

NationalGeographic.com also had a good explainer on mudslides (which are just a kind of landslides), and this interactive image at the Wall Street Journal really shows the extent of the devastation.

It’s a real tragedy, and one can only hope search teams are able to find and rescue many more of those who are still currently missing, I can’t imagine what their families must be going through…