Remembering "surreal" Mount St. Helens eruption 45 years later
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Photos: From the May 19, 1980, edition of The Oregonian; the aftermath seen on May 28; the mountain in 2016. Photos: (from left): Newspapers.com; UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images; Prisma Bildagentur/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Forty-five years ago Sunday, the Pacific Northwest was reshaped in ways that still reverberate nearly half a century later.
Why it matters: For centuries, people lived in the shadow of Mount St. Helens, but the threat of an eruption had always been theoretical until May 18, 1980.
Flashback: After months of blowing off steam, the mountain erupted at 8:32am, killing 57 people, blotting out the sun across the region and releasing one of the largest debris avalanches ever recorded, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
- "It was like watching the end of the world come slowly, and you could do nothing but watch," eyewitness Lee Harris told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Zoom in: For many that day, the biggest thing they remember is the ash.
- Axios Portland reader Erik Arneson was just a kid when the mountain blew its top, but he remembers "ash was falling out of the sky."
- "I recall seeing it piling up on the windshield of our orange Volkswagen Van," he told Axios. "It was a surreal experience."
Jeff Olson was 7 years old and living in Lake Oswego, where he said "the ash gently fell like winter snow."
- "I thought I was being helpful by wiping it off my father's car," Olson told Axios. "In truth, I damaged his paint job, leaving deep scratches on every surface."
The latest: Holly Weiss-Racine, a geologist at the Cascades Volcano Observatory, said sediment from the eruption is still being dredged from the Toutle River and from the Columbia River downstream.
- The eruption also "spurred long-term improvements in how volcanoes are monitored and how people prepare for and respond to volcanic threats," she told Axios.
💠My thought bubble: I made the long and difficult trek up Mount St. Helens in 2023. Looking down into the crater, with steam still rising from the bottom, my mind struggled to grasp that not that long ago, there had been a whole mountain where now there was just wind and clouds.
- It was almost unsettling to see how something so vast can change so profoundly, so quickly.
What's next: Of all the Northwest's active volcanoes, Mount St. Helens is the most likely to have another eruption, per USGS. But active monitoring of the mountain means we'll have some advance warning if it does.