Its scale was local rather than regional: it buried six longhouses and their contents, not an entire city.

The number of people directly affected, and the human cost of the event, cannot be determined from the archaeological evidence.

Whether anyone was in the houses when the slide occurred, and what happened to them, are questions the evidence cannot answer.

What the evidence can say is that the community as a whole survived.

The oral tradition that preserved the memory of the slide was maintained by a community that relocated and continued.

The cultural practices documented in the Ozette assemblage continued to be practiced, in evolved forms, by the Makah community in the centuries following the disaster.