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.
That certainly sounds like a hell of a thing.
Definitely was. We rode bicycles over to Mossyrock late that Summer, and when we got there it was like being on the moon. Really awesome - in the proper sense of the word.
Much of the eruption wasn't really "volcanic," per se. Magma had superheated the groundwater in the mountain, which was held in place in a liquid state because the mass of the mountain prevented the water from vaporizing. But it made the mountain bulge to the north, and weakened it. The scientists knew what was happening, because it was pretty obvious to see, and warned people to get out. All it took was a sizable enough tremor that Sunday morning to cause the bulge to crack around the edges, and that immense amount of superheated water - now freed of the pressure that had kept it in a liquid state - instantly transformed to its gaseous state and expanded at immense speeds. Just like an unimaginably large bomb going off.
The explosion lifted the water of Spirit Lake 85 feet in the air, and what didn't evaporate in the 800+ degree temperatures came down on the surrounding hills and rolled down into the valleys below mixed with ash and blown-down trees. Madness.
