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May 18th, 1980

Mt St. Helens eruption. I am sure a few of you remember it well and some may even have personal stories. I would love to hear them in the comments. I was living in Minneapolis and remember the smell but that’s about it. There are some pretty good documentaries on You Tube about the event if you are interested. Here is one.

Here is another on the 30th anniversary.
Here is another a guy who went up in 2017

Fascinating event that happened in relative recent history. When you watch something of this magnitude happen you realize how small and not in control humans really are. Not to bring politics in but when someone like AOC talks about climate change and the drastic things we need to do to stop it, I shake my head.

7 replies on “May 18th, 1980”

I lived in Northern Idaho at the time, directly in the path of the ash cloud. We didn’t have power (or running water, or telephones) in those days, but we had heard that the mountain was awake, and there was some concern it was going to erupt. In the afternoon on that day, we noticed the sun was somewhat dimmer than normal, and the landscape had taken on a weird greyish tone, like we were watching it through a filter that stripped the color away. Ash was microscopic – you couldn’t see it falling like snow. It just started appearing the ground, plants, and other surfaces. It was surreal. My dad plugged our small 13-inch black-and-white TV into the car battery so we could catch the news from Spokane (that was our “local” news), and learned that the mountain had exploded.

Nobody really knew the health impact of inhaling the dust, or understood what it would do to vehicles, so they were advising everyone to stay home and not use their cars.

Thankfully, we always had months of stores put away. We lived 5 miles from the nearest maintained (gravel) road, and during spring the dirt roads of our region were going through the “spring break-up” that turned them into mud bogs as the snow melted. Grocery shopping was a monthly trip into Sandpoint, which was 20 miles away when the roads were passable. So we were able to just ride it out for the weeks it took for the air to clear.

The thing that stayed with me after all these years was the weird sepia/b&w tone the landscape took on as the ash started falling.

Wow, how old were you at the time? You guys were really out in the sticks. Did the ash get deep enough to measure? Did the rain wash it away quickly?

I was just 10 at the time – pushing 50 now. I don’t remember how deep the ash got, but it doesn’t seem like it accumulated much, at least not in the woods where we lived. In the towns it seemed to accumulate more, on the roads and sidewalks etc. There wasn’t any of that where I lived. It was so light it got blown around pretty easily by the breeze. The rain washed it away and I remember there was concern about the contamination of the local creeks and rivers, which was a problem because we hauled our water from the creek sometimes, especially when we couldn’t get out due to the road conditions.

We were visiting, very near the mountain, on the evening of May 17th. We got herded out of the area by some very serious official-types who were closing more of the roads (we had come up against the red zone). Next morning, it went boom. We were over in Calgary soon after, and the ash came down on our car most thickly. Yes, I remember it pretty well.

Somewhere in my junk I still have a plastic drinking bottle filled up with the ash we got from the side of the road. A year later, we moved to Washington from Florida and I remember the Toutle River was still choked with blasted tree trunks.

Great story Steve, I am betting the videos will bring back a lot of memories.

I grew up on the east coast, but I remember it happening very well. I remember especially the old-timer who refused to leave his property adjacent to the volcano. I remember the news stories wringing their hands about whether or not he should be forced out. He seemed lucid enough to me, and fully aware of what was about to happen. In the end, the old man stayed and they never found any trace of him after the eruption. But he got to leave this world on his own terms, at least. BTW, I don’t recall how old he actually was, but I was 7 at the time, so pretty much everyone seemed old to me.

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