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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Force Of Nature Journalist And Participant Michael Lienau Chronicles The Volcanic Blast Of Mount St. Helens And Its Aftermath

Outside of tabloid television, few credible journalists are interested in becoming part of the stories they cover.

For one thing, it smacks of grandstanding (think “Geraldo”).

For another, it can be dangerous.

Michael Lienau discovered early in his career just how dangerous it can be. He was only 20 when, as part of a camera crew documenting the destruction wrought by the May 18, 1980, eruption of Mount St. Helens, he and his colleagues became trapped.

They’d come shortly afterward to shoot the ash-covered landscape fully expecting to be picked up after a few hours. And Lienau, for one, was excited about being among the first to film the devastation.

“I was thinking only of myself and getting those once-in-a-lifetime photographs of the mountain and the area,” Lienau says these 15 years later.

But then the unexpected occurred.

Electro-magnetic particles in the volcanic dust caused the crew’s compasses to spin out of control. With no way of gauging their location and all former geographical references having been wiped out by the volcano’s blast, they quickly became lost. They missed their scheduled rendezvous with the chartered helicopter.

And just that fast, they evolved from journalists to participants.

What he and his friends endured over the next few days haunted Lienau for years. It changed him personally and affected the course of his career.

“The main impression I had when we were finally rescued was that there were a lot of questions I couldn’t get answers to,” he says. “It was my dream to try and put all the pieces back together again and get answers to those questions.”

On Sunday at 6 p.m. and on the following Monday and Saturday, cable network WTBS (Cox Cable channel 21) will broadcast an edited version of “The Fire Below Us: Remembering Mount St. Helens.” The 68-minute video, which was produced by Lienau’s Issaquah-based company Global Net Productions, is the documentary filmmaker’s attempt to provide those answers.

The show is part of the premiere episode of the WTBS series “National Geographic’s Explorer.”

For anyone who lived through the eruption, whether in the general area of the once-majestic mountain or hundreds of miles away in Spokane and elsewhere, “The Fire Below Us” offers a reminder of what that experience was like.

In Spokane, it began in the morning with a dark cloud that moved out of the southeastern skyline and by midafternoon had blotted out the entire sun. Like a thunderstorm without water, a blizzard of fine ash doubling for raindrops, the cloud enveloped everything in its path.

The effect was almost biblically eerie.

One of Lienau’s most pressing concerns was to capture what it was like to be close to the mountain itself. The film sets the scene in the weeks leading up to the eruption, from the first notable earthquake (which struck on March 20 with a magnitude of 4.1). We see the struggle of experts to predict what is going to happen, of government officials concerned about public lives, of members of that public anxious to visit private property deemed to be in a danger zone.

We see the confusing and often conflicting opinions that were being issued right up to the moment that the magma-gorged mountainside blew out with all the force of 2,000 atomic bombs.

A product of eight years’ effort, Lienau’s film combines traditional documentary methods with dramatized stories of survivors whom he interviewed.

Two stories that stand out are those of Jim Scymanky, and Roald Pietan and Venus Dergen.

Scymanky was a logger who was working with three other men just 12 miles north of the volcano when it blew that morning. There was no warning, no sound, just a hot blast of gas and ash that engulfed the men, knocking flat both them and the trees that lined the ridge they’d been logging.

Stumbling through the sudden wasteland, three of the men were eventually picked up by a rescue helicopter. Only Scymanky is alive today to tell about it, and one of the film’s most touching moments comes when he returns to the site for the first time to plant three white crosses as memorials for his friends.

“It was his idea to do that,” Lienau says.

Pietan and Dergen, meanwhile, were fishing the south fork of the Toutle River, some 23 miles south of the volcano. When the mountain came apart, displacing much of the water feeding the area’s river systems, rivers such as the Toutle rose up to six feet. A torrent of torn trees and other debris came rushing at the two unsuspecting anglers.

Swept away, they struggled to stay afloat amid giant tree trunks that alternately buoyed and bashed them. They, too, were finally picked up by a passing helicopter.

And then there is Lienau’s own tale. His crew hadn’t prepared for a lengthy stay, and when the first and then second night passed, they began to worry.

“Two long days and night,” Lienau recalls. “That’s when I started really thinking, ‘We may not get out of here. What if it blows again and comes right at us, like it did all of these other people who died without having any warning?”’

In fact, they endured through the second major eruption. The problem then was merely how to survive in such a barren landscape, at an elevation of 5,500 feet and with few supplies.

“Each step was painful,” Lienau says. “The soles of my boots had been falling apart, and I had to tie them with twine. We tried to find shelter, but a lot of the trees had been blasted against the side of the hill. It was really hard to build fires because all the branches had been blasted off or burned. And then it was wet on top of that because of all the rain and snowfall that was coming down.”

A devout Christian, Lienau spent time praying and reading a pocket Bible that he carried. He remembers finally hearing the helicopters that would eventually find them. They passed by.

“And I asked God to send those helicopters back, and sure enough, I saw them rising over that hill,” he says. “It was a miracle to me. They looked like angels coming over that hill.”

Since that day, Lienau has struggled to make a go of his video-film business. He’s directed and produced a number of projects, from documentaries for Billy Graham to a CBS Movie of the Week titled “Portrait of a Serial Arsonist.”

But he always knew he would return to Mount St. Helens, both to the stories that remained to be told and the message that he needed to pass on.

“It stands out in my mind as a monument,” he says. “It really humbled me, and I really remember that all of the time. I guess that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to make the film, just to make people think about things a little bit. Disasters happen all the time, and our lives can be snuffed out at any second.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos