Remembering Mount Saint Helens

Mount Saint Helens

The May 18, 1980 eruption left a crater approximately 1 mile wide and 2 miles long.

May 18, 2025 is the 45th anniversary of Mt. St. Helens blowing its top. Don’t miss our Mt. St. Helens exhibit and events! Learn more here.

BY GALE METCALF

“Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it!”

Seconds after David Johnson broadcast those words at 8:32 a.m. on May 18, 1980 to the Vancouver headquarters of the United States Geological Survey, he was dead.

Seconds later, so were many others camping out, or on an early morning outing traveling the forest roads or hiking the paths of Mount St. Helens that Sunday morning.

One of southwestern Washington state’s most pristine settings overlooking Spirit Lake was blown to oblivion 45 years ago by a catastrophic volcanic explosion equal to 10 to 50 million tons of dynamite. It literally scalped the north face of Mount Saint Helens.

The summit of Mt. St. Helens was reduced from 9,677 feet to 8,363 feet with the blast that created a 1-mile wide horseshoe-shaped crater.

Within hours volcanic ash was falling on the Tri-Cities and eastern Washington. Within days ash had dropped to earth on sister states across the country to the east coast. It meandered into Europe and by early June, less than two weeks after the eruption, ash from Mount St. Helens had completed a round-the-world circuit and was back in Washington state.

Ever more ominous were the 57 confirmed to have been killed by the Mount St. Helens eruption, some of whom were never seen again.

Johnson, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), was monitoring the mountain that morning from an observation post 6 miles away. He was the first to report the volcanic explosion which scientists expected due to with its repeated rumblings.

For 123 years, Mount Saint Helens had lay quiet. Eruptions had last began in 1842, and continued off and on until 1857 with smoke and ash spewing. On March 20, 1980, rumblings began again, an awakening sign not felt for well more than a century.

For the Tri-Cities and other eastern Washington cities, communities and locations even more severely impacted by volcanic ash, a change of pace was immediate.

Travel was halted. Plans were erased. Schedules were sidelined. Inconveniences became the norm.

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. Smaller eastern Washington school districts closed for the remainder of the school year.

Moses Lake, Yakima, Ritzville, Othello, Ephrata, Warden and Soap Lake received ash cleanup help from the Washington state National Guard, ordered by then Governor Dixy Lee Ray. Those activated included 70 Guardsmen from the 303rd Armored Battalion in Pasco. Bellingham’s 286th Engineers Company committed its heavy road working equipment to help Yakima dig out. Cleanup around schools, hospitals and downtown buildings became priorities.

Health authorities were cautioning people to limit exercise outside, and for those with breathing difficulties to stay inside as much as possible.

The public transportation of planes, trains, and buses came to a halt in the Tri-Cities, and motorists found blockades to roads they wanted to travel, as many state roads, including major highways in places, were closed.

Motels filled, shelters arose, travelers were stranded, and two local high school bands, Kamiakin in Spokane, and Hanford in Ellensburg, could not get home. Work at Hanford dropped with the limits of workers being unable to reach the site. Vacation and recreation sites in Washington state became ghost towns.

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.”

Destructive and cleanup costs came to $1.1 billion to the losses of civil works, timber and agriculture.

Destroyed were 200 homes, 185 miles of highway, 47 bridges, and 15 miles of railroad line.

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 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. Enroute home, 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 the young man living along the Toutle 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 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.

Boulders, houses, vehicles, and logs crashed downstream in a raging river 25 feet higher than normal. It tore at anything that got in its way. The night was eerie, inky black buttressed by the roar of destruction only a few yards away.

A Washington State Patrol officer, Trooper Tim Green, had been for several hours preventing traffic from crossing a bridge. Two bridges were at that location and troopers were keeping motorists from using either one for fear of them being weakened as piers were repeatedly pounded by heavy debris. Trooper Green would be on the scene for several more hours. The reporter shared food with the trooper who had no relief for hours.

The reporter made his way by back roads 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, that was overwhelmed, but still providing loving care for the many animals being brought in.

“Where’d you get the cat?” one shelter caregiver asked.

“Floating down the river in a boat,” the rescuer 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.