Retirees restore memorial to mudslide victims

CANYONVILLE — A grim headline led the front page of the Jan. 17, 1974, edition of The News-Review.

“Repairmen Buried By Massive Slide,” it said, in bold letters running across the top of the page.

The victims of the mudslide — seven Pacific Northwest Bell telephone repairmen and two employees of a Gold Hill contractor — were trying to repair a phone line just south of Canyonville that had been snapped by a previous slide. The coaxial cable they were trying to repair was a major transmission line between Portland and Sacramento, Calif., and the men and other workers had been dispatched to a tiny repeater station at the base of Canyon Mountain to fix it.

Around 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 16, the saturated hillside, weakened already by a torrent of recent rain and the first landslide, gave way in another massive slide that thundered down the mountain in one sudden, fluid movement. An estimated 15,000 cubic yards of earthen debris swept workers, the repeater station and heavy equipment down the hill and into nearby Canyon Creek.

The nine workers were missing and presumed dead.

“It had done a whole lot of raining for a week or two and the mud just turned liquid, you know, and just came down the hill,” said Dixonville resident Carl Mason, a Pacific Northwest Bell employee at the time.

“One of the guys, Bob Miller, was on my bowling team ... it was a terrible time,” Mason said. “I worked 43 years and enjoyed every day I worked, except that day was bad.”

In addition to Miller, a Roseburg resident, the slide claimed the lives of phone company employees Gilbert Maret of Wilbur, William Centers of Medford, Robert Keller of Lake Oswego, William Combs of Roseburg, Edward Waldron of Jacksonville, and Roy James of Roseburg.

Roseburg resident Mark Garoutte Jr. and Raymond Bell of Myrtle Creek, both employees of the Gold Hill company, Sage Pipeline, were also killed.

Though it’s been 34 years since the disaster, some of the victims’ former colleagues continue to pay tribute to them. Last week, Mason and a handful of his fellow retired phone company employees teamed up to restore a memorial at Canyonville’s Stanton Park that was built just months after the slide.

“That was done by friends and family, and just people wanting to build a memorial to the people that we lost in 1974,” said former phone company worker Donald Dilbeck, of Roseburg, who also helped restore the memorial.

“We pressure-washed the stone, we did that on Monday (June 9), and let it dry, and then we put a gallon of stone sealer on it on Thursday (June 12), and then we put some spar varnish on the bench and that’s about all,” said Dilbeck. “We just wanted to clean it up, you know, it was getting moss pretty heavy.”

The decision to refurbish the memorial was made by members of a club of former phone company employees, known as Pioneer Life Member Club, or PILIME.

Dilbeck said people have gathered at the memorial on various anniversaries of the slide, though as time has passed and the poignancy of the memory has softened, the number of people who gather to remember the tragedy has dwindled.

For others, however, the memories are still fresh.

On the night of the slide, Dilbeck was working as the toll chief at the company’s Mosher Street office in Roseburg, where the phone company housed its long-distance facilities, microwave radio transmitter, cable and other equipment.

“At the time that it happened … we were talking to the man that was in that little block repeater station at the time, and all of a sudden he wasn’t there,” said Dilbeck.

The Roseburg office had lost all contact with the Canyonville team, so more utility workers, Oregon State Police and other emergency workers were dispatched to see what had happened.

“In 20 minutes we got a call back saying, ‘Hey, this whole hillside is caved in and these trucks and people are buried under hundreds of feet of dirt,’” Dilbeck said.

Calls were placed to logging companies, heavy construction companies and any other outfit with heavy equipment so rescue efforts could get under way.

“But there was no way you could save any of those people because they were buried under a hundred feet of dirt. It took a long time to dig them out,” Dilbeck said. “It was a pretty big mess.”

The man in the repeater station with whom the Roseburg team had lost contact was Sutherlin resident Bill Combs’ father, Bill Combs Sr. The elder Combs was a transmission man with the phone company, and was inside the small concrete repeater station when the massive tide of mud and debris swept it downhill.

Combs, an only child and now a captain with Douglas County Fire District No. 2, was about 17 when he and his mother learned what had happened to his father and the others who’d been sent to repair the line after the first slide.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time, but then of course another major slide followed it. But that’s what those guys did. They’re kind of like other emergency workers,” Combs said. “When things are broken they kind of feel a duty and responsibility to get things back online and get things working.”

Combs said the community seemed to rally round the families of the slain workers.

“There was always somebody there to pick you up and cheer you up and make sure you were doing OK along the way,” Combs said.

Losing her longtime husband left Combs’ mother, Jane, with a psychological scar that would never quite heal, he said.

“I don’t think she ever really recovered from it,” Combs said. “Some people seem to be able to pick the pieces up and go on with their lives, but she was never really able to do that. It was a significant, life-changing event.”

Jane Combs died in 2003.

The experience of losing his father so suddenly may have helped Combs in at least one respect: In his 32 years as a firefighter, he has come across many who have lost loved ones in similarly unexpected tragedies.

“You see things like this happen, not on a regular basis, but you see people going through similar traumatic events that you try to do what you can to help them,” Combs said. “I think you lose somebody like that suddenly without warning, you tend to look at things like that a little different when other people are faced with the same thing. You know what they’re feeling.”



• You can reach City Editor Christian Bringhurst at 957-4201 or by e-mail at cbringhurst@nrtoday.com.