One year after flooding, presumed victim still missing
‘I think God just took him, body and all,’ says Winlock man’s wife
WINLOCK, Wash. – The search for the only fatality from last December’s flood hasn’t really ended.
His wife goes to the back of their Winlock yard often, scanning the now-tiny Wallers Creek for signs of her husband.
His grandchildren have walked the waterways for miles, all the way to the mouth of the Cowlitz River.
The police chief near the end of this summer put together some 60 divers, dogs and ground teams who moved six abreast down Wallers Creek and then Olequa Creek, nearly to Vader.
Nathan “Richard” Hiatt, 81, remains missing and presumed drowned.
“I think God just took him, body and all,” his wife, Mary Ann Hiatt, said recently. “That gives me some consolation.”
Richard Hiatt, a retired Weyerhaeuser worker, went outside Dec. 3, 2007, as the basement of their Winlock home began to fill with water. Police and some of his family speculate he went to the rear of the property to check a drain and slipped into the raging creek when its steep bank caved in.
When record rains and flooding lifted the Chehalis River over its banks a year ago, prompting hundreds of residents from Pe Ell to Centralia and Oakville to evacuate or flee to rooftops, other streams, creeks and rivers around Lewis County swelled as well.
Wallers Creek, also known as King Creek, filled the deep ravine behind the Hiatts’ house at Byham and Dexter roads. Winlock Police Chief Terry Williams said it’s not surprising the bank sloughed off; it wasn’t solid, probably from decades of grass clippings and other fill dumped at the rear of the property.
At the one-year mark, questions remain – primarily, where is his body?
“It eats at you, and now that the year is coming, it’s weighing on all of us,” said his daughter-in-law, Sharon Hiatt, of Vader, Wash. “It just rips our hearts out, because we don’t know.”
She is married to Mike Hiatt, Richard Hiatt’s only son.
All that’s been found is a coat that Sharon and Mike Hiatt say belonged to the Winlock man, but one Mary Ann Hiatt didn’t recognize. Family members found a $50 bill during one of their searches, something they think Richard Hiatt would likely have carried in his pocket.
“My daughter thinks he might be buried down there,” his wife said as she looked down into the ravine.
Chief Williams said anything is possible.
“We’ll keep looking,” Williams said last week. “It was a large landslide, maybe 40 or 50 square yards of earth.”
Richard Hiatt moved from Nebraska to Washington, living in the eastern part of the state and then Toledo. It was his second marriage and Mary Ann’s third when they were wed 20 years ago in Vader.
She describes him as someone who made others feel comfortable, a man who liked to work outside in the yard.
“He was always busy; he always had something to do,” she said. “He didn’t like being idle.”
James Hiatt, 19, has continued to look for his grandfather.
He, his sister and one of his cousins have scoured the creek, thinking they might find his watch, a ring, anything.
“It’s still hard, to think he’s out there somewhere,” the Vader teenager said.