Where were you when Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980? I was living in Dallas when the bulletin interrupted Charles Kuralt’s Sunday morning show. The iconic picture of the mountain blowing its top is seared into my memory. My grad school roommate grew up in Pullman, in southeastern Washington. Her school was actually closed for several days due to falling ash. The volcano has had a few returns to life, most prominently in 2004. A new lava dome has formed in the crater.
Since Washington, Oregon, California, and Alaska are on the Pacific Ring of Fire, any of our mountains could erupt at any time. Our local chief worry is Mount Rainier, which last had a significant eruption in the 18th century. So any time Rainier is visible with an intact peak, locals breathe a sigh of relief.
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Slight correction (I’m the grad school roommate): Our schools were closed for the whole rest of the school year in 1980! They didn’t want the liability of kids walking to school without the dust masks we were all supposed to wear (and what kid wants to walk around with a stupid, hot dust mask on?), and I think they were also having trouble with dust in the heating and air conditioning systems at the schools.
The whole thing was pretty surreal. The mountain erupted around 8 AM that morning, which was a Sunday. Around noon we saw dark clouds approaching, and we thought we were possibly getting acid rain from the sulfur that had been spewed into the atmosphere, so we ran around and put a lot of things in the yard under cover. But what happened was a snowstorm of volcanic ash (no Internet then and information on what was happening was sparse), with the clouds so thick that the street lights came on. The ashfall stopped after an hour or two, but we had about an inch or two of fine, grey ash on the ground, and it was quite a mess! We were supposed to stay inside as much as possible, and they gave out free dust masks to everyone to wear when we went out. For that whole summer, every time a car drove by, clouds of dust went up in the air, and you could still find piles of ash on the sides of roads for at least a decade. People were worried about crops (the Pullman area is a big wheat-growing area), but as it turned out, they were better than average for a few years… the soil in that area is all ancient volcanic ash anyway I guess!
As I was in 8th grade at the time, the whole thing made a big impression. My friend E.V.’s birthday is May 18 (she’s also from Pullman), and she has a volcano-themed birthday party every year even now!