Amazing Documentary

We went to the Trans Am race in Portland in June 1981 and there was ash everywhere. Cars were running extra air filters. Raced in Spokane in August and it was still thick if you went off track. We heard the boom in Salem, Oregon.

Eat a dick

Why did god do that to the PNW?

Take your pick.

Some of my girlfriends have experienced that.

A huge dusty fart?

Heheheh

Harry Truman died in that s-plosion

I was within 30 miles as the third eruption was going off

I knew David Johnston (Portland - this is it!). He was best friends with a friend of mine.

Real nice guy.

I was in Oak Harbor when she went, we were camping and it was loud, went past the barricades later on and collected the ash, lost it later in life, no idea where.
Was weird seeing all the trees down, all the short trees, then realized they were very large trees buried in the mud, very deep and the toutle river was full of mud.
Found a pay phone and called home, when I got the phone bill I found out I had called from a place called Littlerock.

Thanks for sharing this video.

It’s a super cool place to visit. Having been through a few hurricanes, forest fires, and tornadoes, nothing I’ve seen comes close to the destruction of that mountain.

It’s absolutely incredible.

I pheasant hunted with his neighbor’s dad

The rivers were a grey mess the ash stured up by cars would bother my lungs months later.

I rode up to the Spirit Lake overlook from Randle maybe 15 years ago, the damage that still exists is incredible.

I hear'd it blode rocks as big as a pick-up truck 20 miles up.

The Lort work in mysterious ways

He do ....

RIP

Visited the Johnston’s Ridge Observatory three years ago. Amazing. The big eruption was in my first year at university studying geology. Was amazing to see it.

I was in Lewiston Idaho when it went off. Soon to be wife and I were at the movie theater, don't remember which movie. Came out and it was dark, looked like it was snowing but the smell and weight of the snow flakes told me I was wrong, and it doesn't snow at that time of year. Snow plows cleared the roads for several days and had to change air filters frequently. Quite the experience.

When I was in the Army on active duty at Ft Lewis/ Madigan AMC, me and some of the other guys in the barracks use to go down and climb Mt St Helens in 77 and 78.

I was in Minnesota by the time It blew....

What amazed my memory, was how the Top 1300 feet, where we use to go up to at times... had completely blown off...

That crazy old Harry Truman, that wouldn't evacuate ended up dying up there. He was like 85 or so at the time.... which means he would have been born in the 1890s.

That was kind of sad.

Not sad, he knew what was going to happen and chose to go that way.

Saw it live from my work place in Portland. Went back a few years later and went through the area and some kind of visitors center. Words could not describe the destruction

😂. Good one.

I was stationed at Ft. Lewis when it happened. Some of our dudes were stuck in the south Ranier training area iirc. Quite an impressive ash cloud and I believe I got the second eruption in some old photos.

Well, a long time ago God made himself a volcano. Then those people acted like idiots and moved into the area around it. God's volcano did what volcanoes do. It wasn't his fault that people are stupid. Wait until Rainier blows up with a few million people huddled around like idiots.

this was there long before the people were:

Naples today is chock full of people who wonder why the residents of Pompeii were so dumb. As the very same volcano rumbles over their heads.

I was living in Wasilla, AK when Mount St. Helen's erupted and my truck was covered with ash. Amazing that it traveled that far.

You tell your kid that a candle is hot but he keeps playing with it. You finally give up and let him get burned to learn his lesson. People knew very well what a volcano can do but they still build their homes next to it and used it for a playground. They had months of warning from those who know about that sort of thing but they kept coming and refused to leave. God finally let them get burned and they still didn't learn.
Old Harry Truman said he wasn't afraid of any ol' volcano that hadn't erupted in the 50 years he'd been there. He didn't live long enough to learn anything.

We may read about Mt Rainier one of these days

I have family in the Tacoma-Puyallup area. They've told me about the volcano 'escape routes' and there are signs all along the main highways showing which way to go to escape it if it blows. What a joke. Those highways already have immobile traffic during rush hours. If Rainier was to blow, all their escape routes would do would be to allow a million people to die in their parked cars instead of at home.

You are welcome Hammer.
Isn't it amazing how much destructive power it had?
I missed how many Hiroshima B's the first eruption was equivalent to. Did you catch that?

The first blast sent scalding ash and debris 300 mph down the slope! I know what you mean. That's like telling kids when they see a flash at ground zero to " duck and cover."

I was working for the USGS at the time. A friend of mine was taking care of a tilt meter installed on the summit of the mountain. After it blew his boss asked him if he thought they might be able to find the equipment. His response to him was that it was most likely in low earth orbit. Another friend was due to go to Harry Trumans lodge to change paper on a smoke drum recorder but he over slept and had not left yet. He smiled at me as he told the story and told me that sometimes it pays to be slow.

The USGS planted a tree in David Johnstons honor at the Menlo Park campus. Years later they built a new building where the tree was so instead put a memorial rock in his memory. I knew of him but did not know him personally. He was a young PHD scientist and I was a young physicl science technician.

A couple of years after the event we installed 2 seismic recorders with borehole accelermoters placed 100 feet in the ground. One was at the Cold Water site and the other was at Spirit Lake. There was still steam rising from the ground at the Spirit Lake site. As we were working we would be treated to occasional ash falling on us. It was kind of earie to be working and have ash falling thru the clouds onto us. We were in radio contact with Vancouver and they were monitoring the volcano and assured us that they would let us know in time to get out it the mountain started acting up.

The borehole instrument did not last very long as the heat 100 feet down in the debris flow cooked it. After we retieved it I removed the outside casing and you could tell which way it was leaning in the bottom of the hole as the wax from the waxed string used to tie the wire in was puddled in one corner of the casing.

Interesting work.
Not very many in your department ever had that detail.

And to think Mount Saint Helens is a small volcano compared to Yellowstone ! If Yellowstone blows were all screwed !

Woooh doggies!
I'd hate to see what's under old faithful.
LoL

There's lots of geological evidence that previous generations saw a lot more volcanic activity. As a boy, we'd play in the pumice quarry near my house in WV. It was the last place you'd think that there would be magma.

In 2019 I visited the visitor center 4 miles from the St. Helens summit. The ranger held up a square she had made, one meter on a side, and told us, "Imagine 60,000 tons per second going through this square, 4 miles from the eruption."

Sounds like my girlfriend's IUD

I have an amazing picture of the mountain.
97kb is absolute garbage resolution and the fact you can't directly insert an image is pretty low tech.
Get your tech together, lame ass web site.
Send me a PM and I'll send it to you.

Use a photo hosting website.

Seems like yesterday that it was current events news.

Nope.
After the photobucket fiasco I'll keep my photos local.
Watch your photos disappear when they don't fit the hosting services values.

That's a fo' sho'. That would take out half the US in 1 blast and bury the rest in ash forever.

Yeah this is a really lame place.........How's your site doing?

Can you text it to me?

Got an exclusive tour of the blast zone about 4 months after. The knife-edge effects of those pyroclastic flows were incredible. Old growth timber all flattened with the bark blown off and 10 ft further on one was standing within healthy standing timber. We also stopped at several viewing spots where I would have looked at the mountain and assumed I was perfectly safe. Rigs and heavy equipment at those same sites had all of their paint blasted off and rubber components like hoses, tires, etc melted. Mother Nature can be a real bitch.

I was 9 years old in West Seattle. I still remember that sunny Sunay morning. One of those days in life that as soon as somebody mentions it everything comes back as clear as yesterday.

I hiked up to it 2019. There was still smoke

You could easily see the diminished airborne visibility off of Virginia Beach for months.

I was 6 when it popped. My dad made a fortune cleaning up the ash. They bought sawdust and added water to control the ash when sweeping....they then dumped the sweepers in a pond where the sawdust floated. They recoverd it and repeated the process.

Supposedly like an A-bomb

]Volcanoes also release mind-boggling quantities of energy, though usually not quite on the scale of hurricanes (thankfully for those who live near!). But if we look at a well-known major volcanic eruption, the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, we find that: "In all, Mount St. Helens released 24 megatons of thermal energy, 7 of which was a direct result of the blast. This is equivalent to 1,600 times the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima" (U.S. Geological Survey).

Maybe to show how quickly vast layers can be laid down.

Just look at the 15' layer of ash on Oregon Highway 138 15 miles east of Diamond Lake. The ash came from the explosion of Mt. Mazama about 7500 years ago, leading to the creation of Crater Lake.

I was posted to CFB Shilo in SE Manitoba at the time. We had a couple inches of ash covering everything.
Amazing power in that eruption. I need to visit the site sometime.
Jeff

We were there in 1997. I think the visitor center had just opened. It was amazing to see the size of the trees blown over 10 miles out.

Comment from out of the blue made me laugh.

Well done

Quite the ordeal for sure. I was 5 when she blew, remember handkerchiefs the first couple days, then masks. Rainier blows, gonna be alotta folks hurtin..

For the dumbfuuck that said, "tuttle" its, toutle river... 👍

Quite an event. I lived in Yakima at the time. Had an inch or more on my roof. I set plastic sheets out on my lawn to collect ash. When it stopped, I couldn't even pull up the sheets because of all the weight. I kept several buckets of the stuff and used it to weight the back-end of my pickup when roads were icy. It sure helped to throrw a few handfuls of ash on the ice to get you going.
I flew some NBC? news crews into the crater to report on the dome that was forming but it basiclly was a non-event . I also slow hovered over many acres of corn and hops to blow the ash off, It turned out to be a good thing, I heard that the wheat farmers had a bumper crop,

👍👍

In early 1981 I was being recruited/interviewed for a job near Seattle and, as part of the process, they took me up in a nice pressurized Cessna for a tour of the Puget Sound area. Once we got down to Olympia we flew southeast to have an eagle's view the Mt. St. Helen's area. Evidence of the sweep and magnitude of that eruption event was stunning - difficult to believe that such enormous power can be so quickly unleashed from the Earth's crust.

Creation must have been quite an event.

We had an eruption up here not too long ago with Mt. Redoubt… we evacuated our airplanes (C-17’s) out of an abundance of caution. On a subsequent flight, I had a USGS geologist on board and asked her about her opinion on when it would erupt… She said “geology is a funny thing- it could be 5 minutes from now or 50,000 years”.

Fact, and just as true for earthquake predictions.

I live on a plateau overlooking the mouth of the Nisqually. Could be an interesting view.

Rainier is far from dormant. They have earthquakes up there almost on a weekly basis. Most are very small, likely not even felt by people, but they do have some pretty good shakers on occasion. Some of them are actually glacier quakes, caused by the movement of ice so they don't affect the rocks.

I see Rainier every day that it’s clear enough. Some days it looks really pretty. Some days you can’t help but feel like its looming over you.

When first living in the Puget Sound area, I was tickled by the local expression "Ranier is out today" - which meant that cloudless conditions enable one to see it from a great distance. Quickly came to appreciate that.

I wish there was an angry volcano near Memphrica