On May 18, 1980, the Mount St. Helens volcano in Washington state exploded, leaving 57 people dead or missing.
Bet Raz remembers that!
Do I ever. I was at the airport that morning with a friend, seeing another friend off to Colorado. We were waiting for the underground shuttle train when I felt the ground shake in a way that was somewhat in excess of what I'd expect from airliners landing or taking off. My friends didn't notice it. It was only when we got in the freeway to head home that we saw the ejecta plume.
Enumclaw is to the north, so that first eruption didn't much affect us because the winds took it east and south. But it looked like a nuke had gone off. It was the second eruption, like a week later, that delivered us about a half-inch of ash. Nasty stuff. I still have some stashed in a bottle in a box of mementos here somewhere.
When the boys were young, we were driving south to Portland. When we got to the Nisqually River I pointed out the hills around the bridge. The boys both said "Those hills? What about them?" I told them those hills didn't exist prior to 18 May 1980. They are huge piles of ash dredged out of the river and pushed off the interstate after the eruption. They're now grown over with weeds and grasses, but underneath they are small mountains of ash.
