CLATSKANIE— After the floodwaters receded last week, Misty Roubal thought she and her family were through the worst of it.

The waters of Eilertsen Creek, swollen by a massive Pacific storm, had rushed beneath the family's house west of town, she said, but caused little damage.

"We thought we could make it," said Roubal, who works as a bank teller in Longview.

But then Tuesday's landslide rumbled off a nearby hillside and swallowed the three-bedroom house she shared with her husband, Mike, and their children, 8 and 6.

The mud climbed nearly up to the Roubal's gutters, tossed cars and destroyed three other homes along Highway 30 at Woodson, five miles west of Clatskanie.

As she sat at a Clatskanie Red Cross shelter Wednesday afternoon, Rouble said she wasn't sure what to do next.

"You feel like you lost everything," she said. "I don't know where we're going at this point."

The area had been evacuated shortly before the hillside crashed down, and no one was injured. But the slide showed that last week's storm continues to hammer the region.

Crews worked at a feverish pace to clear Highway 30 Wednesday. A half dozen excavators, some sunk to the top of their tracks, plucked broken timber from the brown slop. Trucks hauled away trees as well as an assortment of ruined cars.

"What a deal, huh? I thought the storm was over," said Bruce Carswell, president of the Portland & Western rail company, whose tracks run alongside Highway 30 at Woodson.

Carswell, who was surveying his company's tracks Wednesday, said Portland & Western worked all last week to reopen the line after the flood. The company, which delivers pulp and chemicals to the Wauna plant two or three times each week, managed to slip one train through Monday. Then Tuesday's landslide shut everything down again.

"We'll be back in business by the end the day," he said. "It's almost passable now."

Don Crom, 40, and his 17-year-old stepson Ian Robinson, came to the site Wednesday to collect a few possessions from their mobile home, which had been twisted and thrown by the slide.

A Columbia County Sheriff's official told the pair they would have 10 minutes inside the house. "Get your most important stuff first — and don't get hurt," he said.

Crom, who installs insulation for a living, said he had been on a nearby county road Tuesday when he saw his home "flip over backwards and wash up on the freeway."

"It sounded like a freight train," he said.

He said he had just finished cleaning up the trailer after it flooded last week. The family's renter's insurance lapsed a few months back.

When the area was evacuated Tuesday, Crom said, "the only thing we left with are the clothes on our back." The Red Cross put the family up at a Clatskanie hotel Wednesday night.

"We've got to start all over in life," Crom said.

After stepping inside the trailer Tuesday, Robinson said the ceiling had caved and some rooms were inaccessible. Glass was broken. His family's belongings were scattered.

"Oh God," he said, "It's just everywhere."

Rod Nichols, of the Oregon Department of Forestry, said debris began incrementally making its way down the hillside ravine during and after last week's storm. Trees and mud, he said, came to rest against a long-abandoned logging railroad grade and plugged a culvert.

The backup, Nichols said, created a pond 40 feet deep and 250 feet across. A landowner in the area noticed the problem and alerted the forestry department. On Tuesday, heavy equipment operators had been working to divert the water. But the grade was giving way. Workers could hear timber snapping.

A forestry official predicted Tuesday morning that the hill would slide. The area was evacuated and the road closed. The hillside cut loose just before noon, sending thousands of trees and tons of mud over the roadway.

Nichols said the debris cascaded 800 feet down the ravine and was traveling at between 30 and 40 mph before it slowed and scattered across the highway. The damage covered an area roughly the length of three football fields.

Closing the road and evacuating homeowners "saved some lives, I'm sure," he said.