Panorama from wiki:



I remember this well even though I was a kid, and remember collecting ash off our patio.

I was on a Boy Scout campout just north of Spokane Wa - we heard the explosion that morning - it was very loud even though we were hundreds of miles away.
We headed back home and by 3pm, the sunny May afternoon looked like midnight in a December snowstorm - but with ash instead of snow.

I was in 6th grade and remember our science class got a lot more interesting after this till school ended.

drift>>
And later that year was the miracle on ice, when a bunch of US college players beat the Russians.

HK Ag

My wife and I were in the car heading out to meet her folks on I90 west when the ash cloud descended on us. It went from a bright sunny day to pitch black and raining ash. The State Patrol had officers with gas masks on to turn everyone around to head back to town.

The thing is, we had no idea what was going on because we hadn't been listening to the news. We thought it was from a nuclear blast. Scared the shit out of us, needless to say. Turned into the scariest drive of my life because visibility was down to about 3 ft. and we had to tailgate the car in front of us so we could see their taillights. I kept thinking that if he went off the road I would just follow him and the guy behind me would follow me off the road. We drove 15 miles like that at 5-10 MPH. By the time we got home there was 3 in. of ash on the ground. The cleanup took weeks.


I never want to go through that ever again. I pray that Mt. Rainier plays nice for a very long time.

Jim

I remember watching the ash cloud come over later that afternoon. Pretty eerie. Ended up with about 3" of ash on the ground as I recall. Everyone was walking around with masks on for several days and they told us not to drive.

It was a Sunday, I was inside most of the day and the wind was blowing the other direction (from the west). I didn't even know it had happened until I saw it on the news that evening. We got no ash at all. About a month later there was a smaller eruption and that time the wind was from the east and we got about an inch of ash at my place ~15 miles west of downtown Portland.

One of my favorite videos from the eruption. Go to 1:16 to see the eruption.

A friend was with his family at a camp near the mountain. When it blew the lahar wiped out their access road. Then the ash and smoke started. They cut brush to open an old logging road the drove up a hill to reach a dirt road. They never went back.

I remember a few days after this being 6 years old and sick as a dog. Puking from food poisoning or the flu. I told my mom I felt like Mt st Helens and she laughed good.

Living in the west, you should have a earthquake kit, with the frequency of forest fires near built-up areas, and the possibility of volcanic eruptions, adding N95/respirator masks, shovels and chain saws are a good idea.
The early 80's were fun times..Mt.St Helens, first Space Shuttle launch, attempted assassinations of Reagan and the Pope, The Day After, Chernobyl...

Getting the Columbia River open again for shipping from Portland was a huge undertaking.

quote:

Originally posted by HK Ag:

And later that year was the miracle on ice, when a bunch of US college players beat the Russians.

HK Ag

Nope, 2/22/80. They went on to beat Finland for the Gold.

I was in Utah, working for an earth science engineering firm, we studied things such as earthquakes, volcanos, rock mechanics, etc. The engineers in the firm were having a heyday. (Same thing with various earthquakes in CA).

Fun Fact, Sig Forum's own LBJ was on the mountain the day prior to the eruption.....and now he's dodging lava on the Big Island in Hawaii right now.....

I still have a few audio tape cassettes my grandfather taped of the radio news when he lived in Portland, and a few of the newspapers he sent me. We visited Portland that year in June, and the airline captain on the flight took an extra few minutes to fly us around the remnants and dipped us a bit so we could stare right down into the caldera. It was an amazing sight. I remember piles of ash everywhere, plowed up like so many snowpiles.

I do remember one radio announcer saying "For those of you wanting to go out and see Mt. St. Helens in Washington this year, don't worry...Mt. St. Helens is coming out to see you."