40 years ago in Washington: Mount St. Helens shows ‘her most vital seismic signs yet’

Note to readers: For the next few Sundays, we’ll be going back 40 years, instead of the usual 100 years, to chronicle the news that was coming out of Mount St. Helens in 1980.

On April 5, 1980, The Spokesman-Review’s front page ran this headline: “It’s Shaking and Baking.”

Mount St. Helens was showing “her most vital seismic signs yet,” wrote reporter John Kafentzis, with several powerful earthquakes and harmonic tremors.

The mountain was even tossing up “ice bombs” – frozen projectiles up to 20 feet long.

Kafentzis, stationed near Vancouver, reported the next day that the mountain had quieted down somewhat.

Washington State Patrol troopers were having a hard time keeping sightseers away from the mountain. About 60 National Guard troops were called in to relieve the troopers on the roadblocks.

Some good news: Dinky the cat, who streaked up a fir tree when the mountain first rumbled, had been rescued after eight days by a tree-climbing forester.

On April 8, 1980, the paper reported that the mountain was still “perking away like a car idling.” On April 9, scientists expressed the hope that the chances for a full-scale eruption were lessening.

The volcano had dominated the news for weeks, but now it had moved off the front page.

Oddly, some people were disappointed. The Spokesman-Review ran a guest editorial from the Oregonian that expressed the “secret hope that Mount St. Helens will put on a good show … a respectable eruption that will cause the world to admire one of the youngest of all of the volcanic sisters.”

This seems spectacularly misguided in retrospect, but the Oregonian did admit that it was not in favor of a “big China Syndrome core meltdown.”