44 Years Since Mt. St. Helens Blew It’s Top
By Gale Metcalf
At 8:32 a.m. 44 years ago. eastern Washington and a swath of Washington state was transformed.
On May 18, 1980, lives were thrown into chaos. Travel was halted. Plans were erased. Schedules were sidelined. Inconveniences became the norm.
And, lives were lost.
Mt. St. Helens in the Cascade Mountains chain from its emplacement on the southwestern Washington landscape erupted in a cataclysmic blast that sent a nuclear like force down its face, sprung so much volcanic ash into the sky that it would carry hundreds of miles across the state and thousands of miles into sister states.
Within three days, the volcanic ash cloud had crossed the United States. Within 15 days, the ash cloud had encircled the earth, reaching destinations where people had never heard of Mt. St. Helens.
It choked the freshness from the air in towns and cities, obliterated the sun from the morning sky, dusted away nature’s colors from its trees and landscape, leaving dull, eerie ghost-like remains to depress people's emotions that Sunday morning as they tried fathoming something completely foreign to their lives.
And for the families of 57 people who perished on Mt. St. Helens, it was a morning that began with worry, and ultimately manifested itself into the grief that was to come when the hope for survival of their loved ones gave way to the hopelessness spawned by the realization of how destructive the blast had been.
It has been described as the “largest historical landslide on earth.”
According to Wikipedia, “it remains the deadliest and most economically destructive volcanic event in U.S. history.”
Destroyed were 200 homes, 185 miles of highway, 47 bridges, and 15 miles of railroad line.
The summit of Mt. St. Helens was reduced from 9,677 feet to 8,363 feet by the blast that created a 1-mile wide horseshoe-shaped crater.
The Tri-Cities were spared much of the destructive aftermath of Mt. St. Helens, but individual stories grew out of experiences by many Tri-Citians.
A Kennewick man, his young son and a friend were fishing near Palouse Falls. They heard of the eruption and of a light dusting of ash coming down on Benton City and around the Tri-Cities. They looked forward to seeing the “dusting.” Before they reached their car they, the car, and the road out were caked in volcanic ash. Visibility was almost nonexistent.
A group of white-water rafters from the Tri-Cities were running the rapids of the Wenatchee River and enjoying its spacing of tranquil waters. They were mystified by the strange looking cloud moving in when not a touch of breeze was in the air. They would end up holed in a Wenatchee motel for days until making a break for Seattle, heading down to Portland, and making their way home through the Columbia River Gorge.
A Kennewick woman employed and living in Othello was hitchhiking back to Othello when she and the highway she was on were soon enveloped by volcanic ash. She didn't see a passing car the next three days and spent three nights sleeping in the ash off the side of the road before finally reaching her Othello home by walking the entire distance.
A Tri-City Herald reporter was visiting friends in Redmond that weekend. He and other motorists were stopped near North Bend and were told they could go no further east. He returned to the home of his friends, followed reports on the radio, and then decided to head out south and perhaps find a story or two.
He found many.
There was a young man living along the Cowlitz River who escaped the river’s destructiveness caused by the blast. He was wearing pants at least three sizes too big, and securing them with one hand because he had no belt. He grabbed what pants he could while escaping from his house.
He took the Herald reporter to the river’s edge where the blackness prevented seeing anything, but where sounds of destruction could be heard in the tons of debris crashing into itself and the shoreline.
A Washington State Patrol officer, Trooper Green, had for several hours prevented traffic from crossing a bridge over the Cowlitz River for fear of it being weakened as its piers were repeatedly struck by heavy debris. He would be on the scene for several more hours. The reporter shared food with the trooper who had had no relief for hours.
The reporter made his way to a shelter set up for families who lost everything or who were threatened by the dangers imposed by post-blast conditions.
“It was cold, like you could feel the river,” one woman, weary in her tone, said as she was describing events impacting her and her family.
The reporter visited an animal shelter, overwhelmed but still loving and caring for the many animals being brought in.
“Where’d you get the cat?” one rescuer was asked.
“Floating down the river in a boat,” he responded.
Rescuers of a beaver caked in mud and debris, washed, cleaned and prepared the beaver for return to the wilds. The reporter accompanied them to a pristine body of water in the forest unaffected by Mt. St. Helens and watched his happy release to the smiling of his rescuers knowledgeable in the ways of beavers.
The stories of personal experiences went on and on. The memories remain to this day 44 years later.