Indian Country - 3/29/13
TED S. WARREN/AP
But for a dead flashlight battery, Bret Holmes would be buried in a pile of dirt at the base of a newly formed cliff.
Staying in the Whidbey Island home of his recently deceased father and stepmother while he readied it for sale, Holmes was awakened at about 4 a.m. on Thursday March 28 by an earthquake-like rumbling sound, he told The Seattle Times. He ventured outside with a flashlight in the pre-dawn hours and had just time to note the absence of about 20 trees, some of them 200 feet tall, before his flashlight battery died. He went inside for a new flashlight and came back to find that “where I had been standing was no longer there,” he told the newspaper. The landslide, 400 to 500 yards wide and descending 600 to 700 yards down toward the water, ate 75 feet of the backyard, which now ends in a sheer drop.
Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/03/29/landslide-takes-slice-out-whidbey-island-washington-state-148436
