On May 4, many of the village residents were inside watching the Stanley Cup hockey play-off. According to residents with dogs, their well-behaved canines began barking incessantly around 7:00 pm. The noisy dogs were sent outside where they sniffed the ground, ran around in circles and continued to bark loudly. Almost four hours later, the earth opened up and part of the village dropped approximately 100 feet, forming a canyon where a river of liquefied clay swept houses away. Thirty-eight houses were gone and 31 people lost their lives.
It was later discovered that the village was built directly atop the site of another landslide that happened some 500 years earlier, causing the ground to be unstable during the heavy rains the village was experiencing at the time. The entire area was declared unfit for habitation by the Canadian government, and the survivors were established in a new community at no cost to them.
