By Gordon Williams 

Retired Red Cross executive Chuck Morrison was at home doing Saturday afternoon chores 10 years ago when a phone call alerted him to the mudslide at Oso. Morrison was then executive director of the Red Cross Snohomish County chapter. That phone call marked the beginning of an episode that would run on for years, testing the ability of the Red Cross to manage disasters as few events have ever done. 

Morrison ran the Snohomish chapter (now the Northwest Washington chapter) for over 14 years until he retired in 2018. During those years, he responded to roughly 1,500 events — home fires for the most part, but also floods. None of those came remotely close to what happened at Oso — 43 people dead and a whole community wiped out. Morrison says he got the phone call at 2 pm. By 4:30 he was in Darrington WA, the nearest community of any size to the tiny village of Oso.

He helped open a Red Cross shelter and launch the volunteer recruiting drive that would eventually bring in an army of Red Crossers to the area. Most came from local chapters, others from surrounding states, even Red Cross national headquarters in Washington D.C. 

It was a difficult response from the start. One immediate problem, Morrison says, is that the Sauk River, which flows through the area, was being blocked by a 20-foot-high wall of mud. “The river was backing up and threatening to flood everything,” he says. Emergency workers were finally able to poke holes in the mud, lessening the flood danger.  A second issue was that roads in the area were covered with mud.

The Red Cross shelter was on the West side of the slide, while many of those needing help were on the East side. What should have been a short drive turned into a loop of nearly 100 miles. 

Morrison remained on scene for most of the night, and then returned home for a must-attend Red Cross meeting on Sunday morning. “I was ready to go back to Oso but friends at the meeting saw how exhausted I was and persuaded me to go home and get some sleep,” he says. 

In fact, Morrison returned to the scene dozens of times over the next few years. Long after the initial response was done, relief workers met frequently to talk about Oso’s future and to decide how to spend the relief money donated to support the community.

In the end, it took upwards of four years for all of that generosity to be spent. What Morrison found especially gratifying was the way the Red Cross and other non-profit agencies worked with the Darrington officials in perfect harmony. “We showed how well a community and the non-profits came together to solve a challenge,” he says. 

Morrison says lining up Red Cross volunteers was never a problem. He admits that even he was impressed by the way volunteers responded quickly to the disaster.

Morrison was equally impressed with the way the Red Cross and other relief agencies worked together as a team in the disaster response. “Our ability to work with other non-profits was really incredible,” he says.

He was particularly careful to share the leadership role in responding to the event with other response agencies. One lucky break, Morrison says, was in having a member of the response team who had worked with the county department of emergency management. “It was our good fortune to have someone on our team who knew how to organize things and make things happen,” Morrison says. “He was so valuable we eventually had to put him on payroll.” 

While the Red Cross shelters stayed open for weeks, they seldom held more than 30 or 40 people at a time. What made shelter work especially grueling is that many of those in shelters had lost homes and loved ones in the slide.

Morrison remembers one Red Cross client who had left his son at home and gone grocery shopping just before the slide hit. “He lost both his home and his son,” Morrison says. Nothing came remotely close to what happened at Oso for Morrison, after decades with the American Red Cross. It was without precedent — the deadliest slide in U.S. history.

Now that he is retired, Morrison lives in Oregon. Though it has been a decade, the memories in Oso remain fresh in his mind. When we talked, Morrison was planning a trip up to Washington. One certain spot on that trip will be Darrington.