An aerial photo from May shows the massive December landslide that swept down off Weyerhaeuser property, across Oregon Highway 229 and destroyed or damaged houses along the Siletz River. (ODOT photo)By DANA TIMS/Lincoln Chronicle
Four Lincoln County property owners whose houses were damaged or destroyed by a massive landslide on Oregon Highway 229 north of Siletz in December are suing the Northwest timber giant they say is to blame.
Their lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court in Eugene, seeks unspecified monetary damages “to be determined at trial.”
It represents the first legal fallout from the Dec. 12 landslide that buried a 1,000-foot-long section of Highway 229 between Kernville and Siletz beneath tons of mud, rock, trees and other debris.
And it alleges that Seattle-based Weyerhaeuser, which acquired the acreage on which the landslide occurred, knew of the instability, but failed to alert nearby landowners about the dangers.
“For six years, Weyerhaeuser watched the clear-cut slope above the Siletz Highway slump, crack, and creep toward Plaintiffs’ homes,” according to the 10-page filing. “It never investigated, never stabilized, never warned.”
A federal lawsuit says the December landslide came off Weyerhaeuser property that had been clearcut between 2009 and 2011 and showed signs of failing a month before it swept into the Siletz River. (ODOT photo)The closest the company came to informing residents of the imminent danger of a slide, according to the lawsuit, came one month before the incident, “when its representatives asked the residents below to watch the hillside for it.”
“Weeks later,” it continued, “before dawn on Dec. 12, 2025, the hillside collapsed burying a thousand feet of state highway, destroying or ruining plaintiffs’ homes, and pushing mud, rock, and shattered houses into the Siletz River. This action seeks to hold Weyerhaeuser responsible – not for harvesting timber, but for watching a known hazard grow above its neighbors’ homes for six years and doing nothing to stop it.”
The plaintiffs, Joseph Jenks, David Clark, Judith Ann Clark and Timothy Hamblin, all own land near milepost 14 along that part of the highway, according to the lawsuit.
The slide occurred on slopes high above their houses, on land that had been clear-cut between 2009 and 2011 by the prior landowner, Plum Creek Timberlands, the suit alleges. Weyerhaeuser acquired the land when it merged with Plum Creek in 2016.
The suit asserts both that Weyerhaeuser should have known that clear cutting can weaken steep slopes, and that aerial photographs of the steep hillside, taken in 2019, showed clear evidence that some sliding had already started to take place.
“Weyerhaeuser knew of the instability,” according to the lawsuit. “Its personnel managed, inspected, and worked the hillside and the surrounding timberlands. It maintained and used roads on and around the slope, and it review aerial imagery of its own lands in the course of managing them. The evidence available to Weyerhaeuser was not subtle. The ground above an occupied neighborhood and a state highway was moving.”
The company, for most than six years, failed to take necessary preventative actions, according to the suit. Instead, the company asked residents to “keep on eye on the hillside” and asked them to report anything “unusual.”
“They did not warn anyone that the slope above the residents’ homes was failing, did not disclose what Weyerhaeuser knew about the hillside’s condition, and did not tell anyone to prepare or to leave,” it went on.
Oregon Department of Transportation engineers examine a portion of the massive slide during a visit in April. The agency says it may be years before it has a solution or rerouting of Oregon Highway 229. (ODOT photo)The suit, filed by Salem attorney Will Riddell, seeks both economic and noneconomic damages all “to be proven at trial.” It also seeks plaintiffs’ costs and “such other and further relief as the Court deems just and equitable.” Homeowners not only lost access to their homes and land, the lawsuit said, but continue to incur displacement, housing and related expenses, and their property values have suffered.
Weyerhaeuser declined to respond to the lawsuit. Kyleigh Gill, the company’s public relations manager for Oregon and Montana, wrote in a brief statement to the Lincoln Chronicle that “We are unable to comment on pending litigation.”
The highway, meanwhile, remains closed, as state engineers and contractors continue efforts to monitor the landslide, which is still moving. Workers are hauling heavy machinery into the area, which will help place the subsurface monitors considered critical toward designing the highway repair.
As many as 400 vehicles a day used the highway prior to the landslide, according to state traffic data. Drivers who once needed only about 20 minutes to travel from U.S. Highway 101 through Kernville south to Siletz must now take a detour that more than triples that time.
Part of the ongoing work involves efforts by state highway engineers to explore what it might take to build a temporary road near the existing – and still buried – highway. Any temporary road is expected to be no larger than two lanes and wide enough only for cars, school buses and garbage trucks.
- Dana Tims is an Oregon freelance writer who contributes regularly to Lincoln Chronicle and can be reached at [email protected]
I live just past mile marker 12 and just since the slide happened we have twice been stuck without a exit or escape route because of the Siletz River rising over its banks. This has created a serious safety hazard. The state has money to fund lawsuits against the president and funds for aid to illegal aliens but doesn’t have any money for repairing the state highway?
I have been thinking the same thing since the slide first happened. Why are they not getting that cleared up? That should be top priority. If this was some out of the way road out in the middle of nowhere that no one uses I could see just leaving it. But this is a major highway and there are people there. Its not right.
The Republican president and Congress keep cutting federal funds, and the Republicans in the state legislature obstruct every attempt to fund ODOT, so yeah that’s correct, they don’t have the money to fix the highway.
Yet whenever there is a disaster in another country the USA sends money to help. How about taking care of our own disasters first?
Hopefully the next two election cycles fix the biggest disaster, otherwise huge cuts have been made to what we spend over there, for those people.
Those of you keep calling for a quick cleanup of this slide and repair of the road simply fail to understand the magnitude of this slide, the fact that it is still active, and the complexity of stopping the movement and rebuilding a road. It could be years before the road is rebuilt and reopened.
The real problem is clear cutting on steep slopes. The mono culture tree farms mustn’t be thought of as corn fields. Dr Suzanne Simard has written in-depth studies on how healthy forests grow. The tree farms can’t grow sufficient root systems to hold soil on steep slopes. The lumber they produce degrades after each harvest. The timber companies know this, but their corporate culture values profits over anything else. Who in the state legislature has the courage to stand up to these corporate giants and create sensible regulations for steep slope clear cutting, especially near rivers, creeks, homes and roadways? Maybe the state can take a cue from the plaintiffs and demand Weyerhaeuser repay the state for the roadway repairs?
This is an article from about 10 years ago, about the legal settlements regarding the Oso, Washington, landslide.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/1011/Oso-landslide-lawsuit-settled-Could-climate-change-affect-future-cases
Oso absolutely horrified me. I spent time researching the causes and comparing before-and-after photos. When the Siletz Highway slide happened, I compared photos of it to the Oso slide. Some of the causes were natural conditions combined with the weather. Other causes were corporate neglect and greed and insufficient research into causes and solutions, resulting in shoddy “band-aid” fixes.. One thing that I learned is that if a corporation is faced with massive fines, it can declare bankruptcy, wait awhile~ and then blithely open shop again under a different name. Or sometimes the same name, as with Johns-Manville:
1982: Facing mounting liability and over 16,000 lawsuits concerning worker asbestosis and mesothelioma, Johns Manville files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
1988: Johns Manville emerges from bankruptcy after creating the first-of-its-kind asbestos personal injury trust fund, initially backed by $2.5 billion to compensate affected victims.
Does compensating victims resolve the problem that created the victims in the first place?
I hope the state is saving up all its receipts as to the cost to repair this highway. It seems to me the state should be suing the property owner as well who had allowed the erosion of the land that led to this damage to both property owners and the state of Oregon.
The structures on this 6 years land were doomed whether they were warned on not. People who claim clear cutting or other Weyerhaeuser activity caused the their losses don’t understand the differences in types of landslides and there causes. Any geo-technical engineer can easily explain that and that is why Weyerhaeuser is being sued for failure to warn instead of actually causing the landslide. Maybe some property owners get damages for improvements made since the duty arose 6 years ago (because if they knew they might not wasted the money on the improvement) but they’re not gonna get anything for structures more than 6 years old and nothing for loss of access since that would have been lost regardless of what Weyerhaeuser did or did not do on the property. So, damages awarded will be a lot lower than if Weyerhaeuser actually caused the slide. Alleged damages must be measured by loss caused by the negligent act (i.e. failure to warn) not by how much they lost because of the landslide. I am not siding with Weyerhaeuser but the truth and law cannot be ignored in a lawsuit.
Weyerhauser, which apparently acquired the property after it was clear-cut, is being sued for failure to warn of the danger, but the lawsuit directly states that clear-cutting leaves slopes prone to landslides:
“As Weyerhaeuser has long known, clear-cutting a steep slope reduces the slope’s stability. Tree roots mechanically reinforce hillside soils, and root strength decays in the years after harvest before replanted trees mature. A forest canopy also intercepts rainfall and draws water from the soil, so removing it raises groundwater levels and pore water pressure. For years after a clear-cut—and particularly during the five-to-fifteen-year window when old root systems have decayed and new ones remain immature—the harvested slope is markedly more prone to landsliding. These effects are well documented and well understood in the timber industry.”