Where were you?

Readers share their accounts of the Mount St. Helens eruption on May 18, 1980

Falling ash better than snowstorm in May

Wendi Helmick, of Veradale, was 9 years old and attending elementary school in Rathdrum, Idaho. Summer vacation began a day or two earlier that year, she recalls.

“I remember not being scared, but just thrilled. Whomever explained it certainly didn’t instill any impending doom. I specifically remember looking out the window at home, and although it was daylight the sky was very dark. Not nighttime dark, but dusk. It was as if a huge storm was coming our way. Nature was suddenly very still.

“The next day my parents tried to make me stay indoors, since the media was touting the dangers of inhaling the fine ash particles. It was imperative that if you did, you wore one of those laborer’s masks. Mask or no mask, I could not be stopped. This was better than a snowstorm in May! I was scooping up jars and jars of the stuff. Looking back, now I wish I would have divided it up into little portions and sold them to tourists, as so many entrepreneurs did back then.

“Years later, as many local artists used the ash in glassworks and ceramics, one of our relatives from Back East commented snobbily, “You guys sure get your money’s worth out of that stuff.” Yes, we did get our money’s worth, I suppose, of memories that few of us will ever forget.”

Eruption even had the chickens confused

Ginny Moos was living on Bainbridge Island at the time and hearing roosters crowing about 8:30 a.m.

“And then I heard two muffled booms. I thought it was strange at the time to hear the roosters crow so late in the morning. It was not until afternoon when I turned on the old black and white TV with tin foil on the antennae that I was amazed to see Jean Enerson from KING 5 News describing pictures of logs and muddy water crashing through the freeway bridges on Interstate 5 near Centralia.”

Cleaning up ash was a community effort

Reta Aris, who now lives in Otis Orchards, was at her home in Greenacres when a relative called saying the mountain had blown and “was heading our way,” she recalled.

“It got real dark outside a couple of hours after we got the phone call. I remember going to the firehouse – I believe the next day – where firemen handed out face masks. I remember seeing police cars with covers over their radiators to try and protect them from the ash. We eventually went into the yard and scooped ash up to put in little sealed bags. I remember what a job it was for the men in our neighborhood to clean the streets up afterwards. They all worked together until it was done.”

Strange rainfall helped his garden grow

Coeur d’Alene resident Bob Brown said he and his family had been putting off spring garden planting in the days before the eruption. Sunday, May 18 was supposed to be garden day, he recalls announcing to his family.

“No excuses, no procrastinations, or no delays permitted – I said this in my deepest and sincerest papa speech voice.

“All went well that morning and early afternoon. Everyone was doing their share, and we were making remarkable progress. The furrows were mostly dug, many of the seeds or plants were in the ground, carefully covered, and I could see that we were going to be able to finish by the end of the day.

“This was before iPods, cell phones and satellite radios, so we had spent the better part of the day totally cut off from civilization. I looked up and saw very dark unusual clouds coming in from the west. We really had to hurry to get done and let some wonderful rainfall on the new crops.

“We dashed about and had almost finished, when the most unusual rain I have ever seen started falling. Slowly at first, it began to pick up as the clouds above kept moving east. I had never seen anything like the small white or gray particles that fell, and having no idea what it was, suggested that we all go in and turn on the TV.

“When we finally realized what was happening and all of the electronic media was going crazy with suggestions about what to do, what not to do, etc., I began to think of the garden, and all of the preparation. I was fully prepared for the entire project to have been a waste of time. Some weeks later, the garden came up the best it had ever been.”

Mountain lights up birthday to remember

Jaigne Beck was living in Anchorage, Alaska, at the time. The eruption took place on her 29th birthday.

“When my mother phoned from California with her usual happy birthday call, she said, ‘And Mount St. Helens wished you a happy birthday too!’ That was the first I heard about the eruption. I remember watching news reports for days after that, trying to imagine what it could have been like. Seeing places like Ritzville (which I’d never heard of) and Spokane dealing with the ash fall. Hearing eye-witness reports, and wondering if that could ever happen to us on such a magnitude.

“After I moved to Eastern Washington in 1989, when I’d mention my birthday is May 18, that date must be seared in the memories of many people because the comment I’d get would be, ‘Oh, the day Mount St. Helens erupted.’ I have felt some odd sort of kinship with Mount St. Helens because of that.”

Like ash cloud, story circled the globe

Tom Green, The Spokesman-Review’s Idaho bureau editor, was working alone in the Seattle bureau of United Press International that Sunday morning when Mount St. Helens erupted. He was the first person to put news of the eruption on the UPI wire.

“We knew the mountain was up to something. Since March, scientists had been monitoring a growing bulge on the side of the mountain and seismic activity underneath it. But nobody, it seemed, had anticipated the magnitude of the eruption or the extent of the devastation that would occur.

“In the first few hours and days of the eruption, the news just got bigger and bigger and bigger. Unbelievable things were happening. The physical events – the loss of the top of the mountain in not much more than an instant, the ash cloud that circled the Earth, the decimated forests, the debris-choked rivers – were almost biblical in scale. As we documented the damage and the danger, we also tried to do justice to the individual stories of death and survival and wonder. We became amateur volcanologists as we learned about phenomena like pyroclastic flows.

“For a young journalist, the Mount St. Helens eruption was early test of performing under pressure. While other UPI reporters were sent to the mountain, I remained in Seattle, piecing together their reports into stories. Those stories showed up in newspapers all over the world. I doubt I”ll ever be involved in as big a story. I got an e-mail the other day from a former UPI colleague who now works for the Washington Post: ‘Happy anniversary. Exactly 25 years ago you called me at home from the UPI office to say, ‘Larry, the top just blew off the mountain.’ “