BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens

Subject: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: Alice
Date: 19 May 07 - 03:57 PM

Volcano Cam
Where were you that day 27 years ago? I was in Helena, MT, where I had been called by the lawyer to sign some papers in my parents'
estate, who had been killed 10 months earlier. I went back to the airport to return home and they said, "no flights, all cancelled
because of the volcano". It was surreal. A brushing, sifting sound in the air as powdery grey ash fell down and covered everything, drifting
in some places.

Alice

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 19 May 07 - 04:44 PM

I was a newly minted college graduate, working in New York City, after having driven east from Washington State six weeks earlier.

My parents sent me tons of clipping and recorded news items and as they started coming out, books about it.

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: Jos
Date: 19 May 07 - 06:19 PM

I remember that within days the weather changed and a promising start to the summer became dull and rainy.

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: Don Firth
Date: 19 May 07 - 07:15 PM

Mt. St. Helens popped her cork at 8:32 a.m. PDT on May 18th, 1980. I was working at the telephone company as an operator at the time. In fact, I plugged into the board at 8:30, just two minutes before she blew.

Bulletins went out on the radio and on television asking people to stay off the telephone lines because they were needed for emergency calls. But that didn't stop them. Within half an hour after the news went out that the mountain had erupted, the phone lines were jammed. No calls could get through.

There were about fifty operators in Unit 5 at the time, and our boards were inundated with people complaining that their calls wouldn't go through and asking for operator assistance. Almost all of these calls were in the nature of "How are things out your way, Aunt Martha?" Real crucial! Genuine emergency calls simply couldn't get through, and there was not a damned thing we could do. I think those people probably have about the same number of brain cells as the folks who want to climb up the mountainside and peer down her throat when an eruption is imminent. Or the people who walk out and examine tidal pools when the water recedes prior to the reported arrival of a tsunami.

When Mt. Baker, east of Bellingham, Washington, started rumbling and venting steam somewhat prior to Mt. St. Helens stealing Baker's thunder (so to speak), an interesting bumper sticker began to appear around Bellingham. It said, "Vote No on Mt. Baker Eruption!" Shortly thereafter, the rumbling and venting subsided.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: katlaughing
Date: 19 May 07 - 07:38 PM

My gosh, was it really that long ago? We were living in Casper, WY and I remember our cars being smothered with the ash, that far away. Anyone with respiratory problems, etc. was advised to stay inside. My doc told me to stay home for a couple of days. It was hard to clean the ash off if one used water, I remember...it turned to a kind of sludge. It was very weird seeing the sky so dark, yet light with the colour of the ash; overcast with ash is not a normal weather pattern for WY!

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: Deckman
Date: 19 May 07 - 08:23 PM

That was a day that will live in my memory forever. I was in a 22' open boat, about a half mile south of Camanoe Head, fishing for salmon. ("Stilly River Sage" knows where I was, but for the rest of you, I was in Central Puget Sound).

When she blew, we felt the concussion and heard the sounds. Sound travels well on water, and we were on the water, sandwiched between the Olympic mountains and the Cascade mountains. As the BOOM traveled up the sound, over one hundred miles away, it kept bouncing back and forth between the two mountain ranges. As a result, we heard and felt five separate and distinct shocks.

We had NO CLUE what had happened. We had no radio on baord, and as we were close to Oak Harbor Naval Air Station, we assumed that a bomber had crashed and exploded.

It wasn't until we got back to the dock at 1:30 that afternoon that we found out what happened. I still remember standing on the summit of that mountain in 1961 ... I'll never fo that again! Bob

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: Alice
Date: 19 May 07 - 11:23 PM

I used to have a jar of the ash that I collected. Lost it in moving several times.

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 19 May 07 - 11:27 PM

One christmas my dad sent a beautiful glass egg made from the ash from St. Helens. These kinds of crafts were popular for a while. It's a clear, opalescent orb. Lovely.

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: Alice
Date: 19 May 07 - 11:33 PM

I saved the ash hoping some day to give it to a potter for glazing.

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: Ebbie
Date: 20 May 07 - 12:15 AM

I was on my way home that Sunday morning after doing our laundry at a laundromat in McMinnville, Oregon. As I drove over a highway overpass on my way to Dayton, a little town 6 miles from Mac, I glanced in the direction of Mt. St. Helens. For weeks we had known she was going to blow- she had to - her side was bulging, even though from time to time some commentator would express doubts of its imminence.

But as I looked in that direction, suddenly there was a - how can I describe it - a silver expanse of flash. It was over in an instant -nothing like the time it took in real time for the pumice and ash to pour out and climb hundreds of feet into the air.

As I walked in my house, my daughter met me at the door. "Mount St. Helens has erupted!"

I was attending community college at the Sylvania campus in Portland at the time and for days the bushes and sidewalks and cars were loaded with the pumice and ash from the mountain. Airplanes were diverted, cars were issued filters and masks, roadsides grew deep with the stuff.

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: Don Firth
Date: 20 May 07 - 01:01 AM

St. Helens didn't just erupt and then quit. It kept going for a few weeks (and still rumbles and smokes a bit).

A week or so after the first eruption on May 18th, my wife's parents were in town. On a Sunday we were heading from where we live on Capitol Hill (Seattle) to Barbara's cousin's for dinner (he lived in White Center, just outside Seattle's south city limits). We heard on the radio that St. Helens was emitting a substantial amount of ash. Heading south on Interstate 5, just on the southern horizon, we could see a pillar of cloud, "mushrooming" a bit at the top, and blowing eastward. We couldn't see the mountain itself.

Seattle had pretty well escaped the ash-fall, but some of that outpouring on the Sunday we went to my wife's cousins must have blown north, because Monday morning, when I went out to the car (parked on the street across from our apartment building), it, and just about everything in sight, looked kind of dusty. It was a light coating of ash.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: Ebbie
Date: 20 May 07 - 01:15 AM

My brother and his family had a small farm (between Ridgefield and Battleground) 30 miles from the mountain and my sister in law always called it her mountain. She never liked as well after part of its side had blown out.

One night it was forecast that another blow was coming and it was raining. My brother and sister in law got out of bed in the middle of the night, went out to the pasture and herded the cows in. They knew if the pumice came down and mixed with the rain, it wouldn't do the cows much good.

After the mountain blew the first time, periodically, as Don said, it would gush again. Once I and some others parked on top of Bald Mountain out of Newberg and watched an eruption. That time it had the distinctive cauliflower activity.

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: Metchosin
Date: 20 May 07 - 03:46 AM

I still remember that day vividly. I was here on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. We spent the day at a friend's BBQ down the road where we roasted marshmallows and had slow cooked salmon and venison tenderloin wrapped in bacon done on poles propped over an open fire. When we returned to the cars up on the road at the end of the day, they were covered with a dusting of fine ash from the eruption. We were amazed that the ash had made it this far west.

A few days before the mountain blew, I had a very vivid dream in which I was home alone with my kids here on our forested hill. Suddenly there was a huge roar of wind and when I looked out the window, not one tree was standing for miles.

When I realized that the driveway and every road was blocked by fallen trees and my children and I were stranded, I awoke in a panic. After the eruption, one of the first photos I saw of the devastation was a picture of the flattened forest, identical to what I had seen in my dream. It creeped me out for years.

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: Lin in Kansas
Date: 20 May 07 - 04:11 AM

A few weeks after St. Helen's erupted, some friends of mine and I decided to fly over and take a look. My friend George and I flew my Aeronca Chief around the mountain, marveling at the destruction of Spirit Lake and the forest surrounding it. George had climbed the missing face of the mountain in his younger times and was awestruck at the sight. It was the only time I can recall his ever being speechless.

My Chief was not terribly speedy, so we didn't get too close or hang around very long--just enough to get some truly striking pictures of the blown-out face. I am amazed at the restoration Mother Nature has done on the lake and the rest of the area.

Lin

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: Deckman
Date: 20 May 07 - 08:54 AM

This is a very telling example of just how intrusive that ash was, and still is really. About two years after the mountain blew, I remodled my cousins home in Tieton, Washington, about 70 miles East of the mountain. During the remodel, I removed and replaced the ceiling in her basement. I found a quarter inch of the ash laying on top of the ceiling boards, that were sandwiched between the floor above and the ceiling below. I was astounded that the ash permiated that far. Bob

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: artbrooks
Date: 20 May 07 - 09:43 AM

I had taken a new job in Denver about 3 months before, and was pissed mildly upset that I was the new guy and couldn't get off to go back to Seattle and ride the annual Seattle-to-Portland bike ride. And besides, we had a brand new baby, born May 5th. We went out to take her to dinner with us in a restaurant for the first time, and found ash all over the car.

The ride ended up being canceled, anyway.

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: johnross
Date: 20 May 07 - 03:27 PM

That year's Northwest Folklife Festival took place a couple of weeks after that first blast, and a relatively minor secondary eruption occurred during the festival weekend, when the wind was blowing toward Seattle.

I still have the handmade poster that we put up that day:

    RAIN AND ASH SCHEDULE TODAY

Subject: RE: BS: Anniversary of Mount Saint Helens
From: Don Firth
Date: 20 May 07 - 05:11 PM

I recall hearing on the news about a businessman who was in Spokane when St. Helens erupted, and he absolutely had to be back in Seattle for a meeting the following day (Monday). All airlines, including the one he was booked on, had grounded their planes. Busses weren't running either, and train connections were such that he couldn't make the meeting in time. He was stuck.

So he hit a taxicab stand and asked one of the drivers to take him to Seattle, offering the cabby a big enough wad of money that he figured he couldn't refuse. But the cabby did.   "Driving through that ash fall would wreck my cab's engine! No way!" So the businessman came up with an idea, and the cabby went for it. They dropped by a couple of auto supply stores and bought every air filter they had in stock, loading the trunk and the back seat with them. Then they picked up a bunch of filter masks for themselves and took off for Seattle. Every few miles they would pull over to the side of the highway and change the air filter.

He put the cabby up in a Seattle hotel and made his meeting okay. Presumably the cab driver got back to Spokane okay with a fat wallet, a more-or-less intact automobile, and a story to tell.

I remember following the recommendation of a newscast and buying a package of filter masks that fit over the nose and mouth (sort of like a surgical mask, but stouter) that filtered out particulate matter, just in case.   A day or two later, there weren't any to be had in the city. Turns out we didn't need them, so they're sitting on a closet shelf (I think).

I've heard that Mt. Rainier has a lot of potential. Now that sucker could make quite a mess!

Don Firth