No other injuries have been reported from six landslides that crashed into different parts of the city Tuesday morning after 2 1/2 inches of rain fell in 24 hours.
    City officials are considering the search as a body recovery effort rather than a rescue.
    Chris Harshey, who is a carpenter, was working on a nearby home when the slide occurred Tuesday morning.
    "All of a sudden, I heard crackling and crumbling, and then the lights flickered," he told the Daily Sitka Sentinel.
    Harshey went outside to investigate and saw "a sea of large logs, mud, more logs and a slurry of muddy debris." The slide destroyed a home about 200 yards above him and damaged another home closer to him.
    The entire landslide lasted about four minutes, he said.
    One of the newly built homes was destroyed in the landslide, and another was damaged, Sitka fire spokeswoman Sara Peterson said. Some other homes in the area were evacuated, but Peterson did not know how many residences or people were affected.
    Homes in town have been flooded, and there were reports of residents not being able to reach their homes or leave their neighborhood, Zidek said.
    Longtime Sitka resident Nolan Simpson said he toured parts of town and saw one home where the driveway was gone, replaced by a stream washing through it. He passed the Indian River and said it was roaring.
    The landslide at the construction site was especially heartbreaking, he said.
    "It's pretty devastating on how fast something like this can happen," Simpson, a retired commercial fisherman, said in a phone interview from a saloon.
    The city of more than 9,000 people declared a state of emergency.
    Sitka, almost 600 miles southeast of Anchorage, sees heavy rain throughout the year. More rain was expected.
    Heavy rain was blamed for a major landslide in September near the town that wiped out hundreds of thousands of dollars in watershed-restoration projects. The rain also damaged a footbridge and trails, including one that had been repaired after flooding in January 2014.
    A year earlier, two people at a U.S. Forest Service cabin near Sitka escaped moments before part of a mountain slid down.