May 18 1980

After a 5.1 magnitude earthquake in Washington state, 57 people are killed in an avalanche of volcanic mud in the eruption of Mount St. Helens. The volcano spews out 200 million cubic yards of of pumice, ash, and debris which covers 24 square miles of the valley below.

I remember seeing the ash plume high over Chicago several days later.
Mark

The director of my engineering department mentioned this anniversary in our staff meeting this morning. How that made the agenda, I'll NEVER know!

I was glad to be living in Indiana at the time of this event, to be perfectly honest!

www.csuchico.edu/~dmwood

not my site just an instructor if anyone is interested
will

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'73 VW camper
'80 300td wagon

I'll never forget the images of that devastation as long as I live. Absolutely jaw-dropping......

oh on that link you need to go to the section that says research interests and click on the Mt.st helens link. it takes you to a bunch of cool stuff like cams and real time seismic information al kinds of stuff

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'73 VW camper
'80 300td wagon

Lost a colleague on duty, watching the mountain. I didn't know him but we're a small shop so I've met his friends. That's they way they'd like to go, too. Doing their science, being on a mountain and loving it all.

B

Got to watch it fairly close by, yet we didn't get all that much ashfall up here in Olympia (~50miles)--quite the spectacle. I rafted the Toutle River the year before the eruption--a pristine meandering stretch teeming with wild salmon and trout. Afterwards, it was a punched out and boiled wasteland of utter devastation. I'll never forget that...

I remember hearing about all the engines that got destroyed from the ash.

My stepmother's family owned two autoparts stores/machine shops in Spokane at the time. They made a killing on airfilters and rebuilt engines.

That was when the saying was:
"Don't come to Washington.
Washington will come to you"

I actually didn't know about the blast until I got home from work that day. Was just married the year before and had a pregnant wife. Had me worried we were going to have ash fallout in our area the way it was drifting so much. But it never came our way. I think it mostly went east if I remember right. I think Spokane got quite abit of it.

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past MB rides:
'68 220D
'68 220D(another one)
'67 230
'84 SD
Current rides:
'06 Lexus RX330
'93 Ford F-250
'96 Corvette
'99 Polaris 700 RMK sled
2011 Polaris Assault
'86 Yamaha TT350(good 'ol thumper)

I got to watch from about 20 or 30 miles to the south in the Portland area. I remember skipping an anthropology class to watch. The school was almost on top of one of the largest hills in the area so we had an unobstructed view. You couldn’t look away from the spectacle because it was so unique and hard to comprehend the scale of the event. There were scads of lightning flashes from around the fast spreading and awe-inspiring black and grey cloud. It just billowed on and on and on into the atmosphere.

At about the same time my folks were heading to Seattle and were detoured all the way to the coast, about 100 miles to the west, due to both the flooding Tootle river closing Interstate 5 and the seemingly implausible amounts of ash fall. It was probably the 2nd most traumatic event I've seen.

I also vaguely remember Portland’s Rose Festival Parade taking place under rain and ash fall. It was eerie beyond the Outer Limits TV show. Like celebrating nuclear winter.

For all this, folks to the east got many times the fallout.

A few weeks later I was hitchhiking from Portland to Seattle and got a ride from a guy who drove up from LA to see the damage done by the volcano. The county had just opened a few ash roads into the area and a string of folks were touring the newly carved trails. There was 0 greenery for miles. No plants, no ground cover. No trees. Miles and miles of forests had not only been knocked down but were simply gone. Creepy doesn’t begin to describe being in the area. Ash and debris deposits were sometimes hundreds of feet tall. You could see the high water mark in a few stripped and shattered old growth tree stalks 80’ or more above where the road had been ploughed. It was sooooo dusty. I took a lot of pix (mostly b&w) of the event. Will have to dig them out......

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...Tracy

'00 ML320 "Casper"
'92 400E "Stella"

I flew over it last year and was amazed to see the trees completely obliterated on one side but still standing on the other. The impression from the air was of a dropped bag of flour on the kitchen floor, all projected from one side.

Isn't it interesting that folk still live on the slopes of active volcanoes such as Vesuvius? I'd be a little concerned.

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'79 280SE
'87 560SEL
'83 280CE
'01 Nissan Micra
'98 VW Passat
'83 911 turbo

Yeah, post a few if you find them. Would be interesting to see.

__________________
past MB rides:
'68 220D
'68 220D(another one)
'67 230
'84 SD
Current rides:
'06 Lexus RX330
'93 Ford F-250
'96 Corvette
'99 Polaris 700 RMK sled
2011 Polaris Assault
'86 Yamaha TT350(good 'ol thumper)

Here are some great pics of the aftermath: Mount St. Helens erupts