(May 18th sparks some intense memories. This excerpt from a chapter in my upcoming memoir explains why.)
A glass jar, filled with heavy, white powder, reminds me of the Mount Saint Helens eruption in Washington State, 45 years ago. A 5.2-magnitude earthquake at 8:32 a.m. on Sunday, May 18, 1980 triggered the largest debris avalanche ever recorded, when a large bulge on the north face of the mountain slid away. Within minutes, ash and hot gases hurled fifteen miles into the air.
Following the landslide, a lateral blast sent hot ash and debris hurtling down the mountain at 300 miles per hour, scorching and flattening everything within 230 square miles, and destroying the little town of Spirit Lake.
Fifty-seven people lost their lives in the eruption, as did over 7,000 big game animals and twelve million juvenile salmon. Not a single tree of a dense forest was left standing within six miles of what had once been the summit. Over the next nine hours, prevailing winds sent 520 million tons of ash eastward across Washington State and beyond.
I lived in the Idaho panhandle, 400 miles due east of Mt. St. Helens. For weeks I'd been seeing the smoking volcano on TV newscasts, as earthquakes increased in frequency and plumes of hot gas appeared more often.
That Sunday, I spent all morning outside, building a pig pen. By early afternoon, I’d almost finished. I noticed the sky to the west darkening rapidly; soon the street light came on in front of the house. We must be in for a humdinger of a thunderstorm, I thought. How odd for May in northern Idaho. Then it hit me. I wonder if that mountain finally blew its top?
I ran inside, switched on the news, and saw almost surreal footage of the volcano, now much shorter than it had been just hours before.
“A huge ash cloud is moving east,” said a reporter. “People living downwind need to stay indoors.”
I made a run to the grocery store. The shelves were almost bare—no bread, no milk left—but I did buy the last six-pack of beer.
Just as I arrived home, the first ash began falling from the sky, cool and gentle as snowflakes. I shut the pigs into their new pen, brought the dog inside, and hunkered down. I didn't get out again for two weeks.
When it finally stopped falling, the ash lay a couple of inches deep in my yard, and the wind blew it about until it coated everything. People wore face masks when going outside, or risked breathing ash and damaging their lungs. Anyone who drove a car through the stuff regretted it, because the fan sucked in ash, destroying the engine. I kept my pickup in the shed and stayed put until it rained.
At that time, I had a house for sale in Ritzville, Washington, about halfway between the volcano and my Idaho home—and directly in the path of the ashfall. A half foot of the stuff blanketed the city. When it seemed safe to drive, I headed out there with a shovel to do some cleanup. I was unprepared for what I saw.
It looked like a war zone—ash everywhere. If the National Guard hadn’t come through and shoveled off the roofs, every building in town might have been flattened. The powder was so heavy I could barely lift a shovelful of it. Municipal officials had designated a vacant city block as a giant dump, where people hauled the ash that they’d removed from their yards. Bulldozers pushed it into piles higher than a two-story building.
Half a decade later found me on the rooftop of my house in Idaho, cleaning the gutters. A layer of fine white ash still lined the asphalt shingles—after years of rain and snow that never washed it all away.
#mtsthelens #ashfall #volcano
Photo by S. G. Benson
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