With Washington landslide toll mounting, a look at Canada’s own history of deadly slides

The toll of the dead and missing from the weekend landslide in Washington state continues to mount, reaching more than 100 Monday.

Canada isn't immune from such natural disasters, though it's been a long time since a slide has killed as many as those potentially lost when a sea of mud inundated the village of Oso, Wash., on Saturday.

British Columbia, with its steep terrain and heavy rainfall, is particularly vulnerable, like some parts of its southern neighbour.

B.C. motorists have been come to expect highway closures due to mud and rock slides, as this CBC News list of recent incidents demonstrates.

Two years ago, four people died when a cascade of mud, logs and other debris swallowed a cluster of rural homes at Johnsons Landing on Kootenay Lake.

About 320,000 cubic metres barrelled down a water channel at estimated speeds up to 150 kilometres an hour, burying a man and his two daughters, as well as a German tourist who'd rented a cabin in the hamlet. A subsequent report last year found it was the largest slide to hit the region in 12,000 years, The Canadian Press said.

[ Related: Washington state mudslide: 108 reports of missing people ]

Local officials declared the terrain was no longer habitable because of the risk of future slides. Some critics blamed logging in the area for creating the instability.

Human activity, or a lack thereof, does sometimes factor into slides. Two homes in a North Vancouver neighbourhood were destroyed, killing one woman as she slept, when the slope above the houses gave way in 2005.

A coroner's report three years later concluded the slide was "predictable and preventable," CBC News reported. Local officials had information that the heavy rains that saturated the earth in the hilly subdivision had caused six slides over the previous three decades and recommendations had been made to stabilize the slopes.

But the deadliest B.C. slides happened early in the 20th century.

Britannia Beach, now a picturesque stop on the Sea-to-Sky Highway from Vancouver to Whistler but once a mining town, was the scene of two deadly slides.

Jane Camp was destroyed when water-logged ground gave way and buried the mining camp in March 1915, killing 56 people. The town site was moved to what was thought was a safer location but six years later, the community now named Britannia Beach was hit by another major slide when a blocked railway-line culvert spanning Britannia Creek became blocked, causing the rail bed to give way. More than 50 houses were swept into Howe Sound, killing 37 people.

A 1909 landslide in Burnaby, now a Vancouver suburb, hit a railway embankment, derailing a work train and killing 22 people.

Although it doesn't have as much mountainous terrain as the West, eastern Canada is not immune from landslide disasters.

In May 1971, the community of St-Jean-Vianney, Que., was hit with a sudden movement of earth caused by record winter snow and rain, killing 31 residents. The mud slide, which happened late in the evening when most people were in bed, started in the crater of a much larger slide that took place 500 years earlier, researchers found.

[ Related: B.C. advises Johnsons Landing residents to move after slide but refuses to help ]

An April 1908 slide at Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette, Que., pushed a wall of clay into the frozen Lièvre River, triggering a wave that included giant, building-crushing blocks of ice. Thirty-three people were killed.

And in 1889, heavy rain loosened rock overhanging Quebec City's Lower Town. The slab fell 90 metres onto Champlain Street, crushing 28 homes and killing more than 40 people.

The worst landslide disaster in Canadian history occurred in 1903 when 82 million tonnes of rock detached itself from Turtle Mountain and buried part of the coal-mining town of Frank, Alta., near the southeast B.C. border.

The Frank Slide took some 90 lives, though a number of miners trapped by the rocks were able to dig their way out. Weather, unstable bedrock and the effects of mining under the mountain are thought to have been factors in the slide.

The scarred mountain and vast debris field covering the town, now the site of an interpretive centre, are a stark reminder of the grim toll the earth can exact on our presence.