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By MARY SWIFT
staff write r
SNOQUALMIE PASS His home was destroyed. But Norm Craven knows he is a lucky man.
Flash back to the morning of Jan. 7, 2009.
Heavy rainfall with nowhere to go was causing
flooding.
The electricity was out at Hyak on Snoqualmie Pass. Norm Craven, then 81, had just put more wood in his fireplace and settled back
into his easy chair to relax when the roar of a massive avalanche startled "It was about as loud as standing by a 747 with all
engines running," Craven recalls. "Out the corner of my eye I saw the wall of my house snap in two about halfway up the house. Snow rushed into my living room
and pushed my chair across the room.
An upright piano sat between the wall and the fireplace. The snow crushed the
piano, Craven says, then instead of coming over him, it flowed around him.
"If there had been anyone else in there with me, they probably would have been
injured. The house moved about 20 feet off its foundation and settled at a 20 degree angle."
Outside the house, people were shouting. Among them: Craven's son, Greg,
who had been headed to his house when the avalanche occurred.
Yelling that he was all right, Craven changed out of lounging clothes into ski clothes and grabbed his wallet and keys.
"I turned 'round and there was a young fireman," he says. "He told me, 'I've got to get you out of here.'"
They went out through the window the fireman had broken to get in.
Craven's home was a total loss.
"I had to have it crushed," he says. "It was about to roll onto the house below it."
Thirteen months after that disaster, Craven's home is being rebuilt at the same site. He says he has no reservations about living there.
"I've skied that area for 50 years," Craven says. "I know it pretty well.
"What happened was, there was a mudslide in the middle of the ski hill which
caused an avalanche. It was a flukey thing. Sometime back, probably 50 or 60 years, somebody filled in a cavity on the hill with old trees and stumps. Nobody
knew that. With the hard rainfall, that area got penetrated and kind of blew out."
Craven, who moved to the area full-time after the death of his wife a decade ago
, still skis. But he hasn't been on the slopes a lot this year, he says. He's too busy trying to get his new home finished.
"My son's the general contractor. It's about 90 percent complete. I'd like to be in by March 30. That's my 83rd birthday," he says.
Reflecting on the events of that day just over a year ago, his tone is matter-of-fact.
He wasn't panicked that day, he says.
"I was alive. Why panic? When those things happen they happen so fast there's no sense getting excited about it."
The landslide that caused the avalanche that destroyed Craven's home also knocked out the main chairlift in the area.
After the slide, "we needed to export all bad material away from the source of the landslide," said Trevor Kostanich, planning and development director for
The Summit at Snoqualmie. "The geotechnical engineers agreed there was still bad material in and around the source of the slide that needed to be transported
to the lower, flatter portion of Hyak. The area disturbed by the debris flow was smoothed out and seeded for future vegetation."
Hyak remains closed to alpine skiing this season.
"It is our highest priority to bring alpine operations back to Hyak, and we have been working diligently to do so," Kostanich said.
The Summit Nordic Center at Hyak, its base for cross country skiing, suffered damage in the slide but was cleaned out and re-opened.
"There's been a lot of Nordic skiing going on this season. It's been busier than ever," says Chris Caviezel, vice president of the Snoqualmie Nordic Club and a
commissioner with Snoqualmie Pass Fire and Rescue.
"There's no competition with the alpine skiers. It's all Nordic at the Summit East
(Hyak) base area. Normally they operate both alpine and Nordic but because they haven't repaired the chairlift they're not able to offer downhill skiing."
As for Craven, "he was very lucky," Caviezel says. "The house was essentially moved from its foundation. I think he was very fortunate. It could have been much worse."to him.
http://www.kvnews.com/articles/2010/02/08/news/doc4b708362139b9181798550.txt
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