in an area as vast as this, that task remains daunting. the crash site is about as close to nowhere as it s possible to be, but it s closer to australia than to anywhere else. reporter: australia is leading the charge, dividing this remote stretch of ocean into color-coded boxes, assigning them to international search teams and then marking them off. as each box is checked off, the families of those on board are growing more desperate for proof their loved ones are gone. most of the families don t believe dfsh most of the families still have hope. reporter: without that hard evidence, superstorm sandy fn wang still clings to the hope that his mother is simply still being held hostages. if they made a deal, maybe our family would be back. that s not all. the investigation into the pilots is also makinging headway. the fbi says the analysis its doing on the hard drives seized
any more survivors. 24 people are now confirmed dead, but some of the bodies remain in that mound of thick mud and debris and rocks because it s just too difficult for the rescuers to safely dig them out. as the operation slowly shifts from rescue to recovery, new questions are being raised about whether this tragedy could have been prevented. cnn correspondent bill weir is live in darington. bill, so it appears this area had a lot of very specific warnings going back to 1999. is that right? reporter: oh, sure, but there s been a lot of slides in this area going back to the 40s, but, yeah, in 2010, geologists, engineers put out this very stark warning, here s a report, here s map of an area where they warned about large, catastrophic failure in the hillside, worried about overlogging, the plateau aabove, erosion from the river below. they talked about tougher zoning laws, maybe even flying people out of the more vulnerable arias
but jim, we ve seen this covering hurricanes and wildfires. retreat is not in the vocabulary of the american home hoern, land northwestern most cases. and so it s very difficult in hindsight to go back and say they should have pushed these people back in this area. these are americans. they don t want to live. when they raised the idea of this maybe 50 years ago over concerns in this area, people were so resistant they tried to secede from the county. they formed their own freedom county and in an ironic twist one of the leaders of that movement is among the missing here today. just very quickly, were these warnings general to area or were they specific, for instance, to this valley where the landslide happened? reporter: they were general to the state of washington. but the most vulnerable areas were certainly noted and this valley is among them. all right. thanks very much to bill weir.
at least one of the objects is similar in size to an object spotted earlier. still, search teams caution they won t be able to confirm the debris came from the plane until ships are able to recover it. it must be emphasized that we cannot tell whether the potential objects are from mh-370. nevertheless, this is another new lead that will help direct the search operation. reporter: so far, none of the 122 objects seen by satellite has been spotted by search planes or ships scouring the area for clues. two new high-tech search aids from the u.s. arrived in australia today, an autonomous underwater vehicle, or auv, which can help detect sunken ones to depths of almost 15,000 feet and a pinger locator, a device that can detect sounds emitted from the flight data recorder to depths of 20,000 feet. neither of these devices will be of any use, however, until a crash zone has been identified.
i found a great new listing. little busy here. nice. uh huh. this one s open right now. let s check it out. it s the agent. they accepted. shut up! we re getting a new house! what? they accepted.owww. [ male announcer ] that moment when it all comes together. that s your moment of trulia. download the free trulia app today. welcome back to the lead. and continuing our world lead, in little more than an hour, search crews will be back over the southern indian ocean looking for any sign of the doomed malaysian airlines flight 370. with time running out before those missing black boxes sop their pinging. searchers continue to scour this area with high-tech military equipment as well as good old-fashioned eyeballs out a window, how do they figure out where to look and what s the priority? we ll bring in tom foreman now, back in our virtual studio weather more. tom, walk us through how they prioritize the grid over what is really a giant area for them to