The day before yesterday was the anniversary of the 1980 Mt. St. Helens main eruption in Washington State.
Before 1980, snow-capped, gracefully symmetrical Mount St. Helens was known as the "Fujiyama of America." Mount St. Helens, other active Cascade volcanoes, and those of Alaska comprise the North American segment of the circum-Pacific "Ring of Fire," a notorious zone that produces frequent, often destructive, earthquake and volcanic activity. (Source: USGS)
The mountain had been "burping" ash for months ahead of the big blowout, and has continued to have occasional smaller eruptions. But early that Sunday morning, while most people were still sleeping, the top 1300+ feet of the mountain blew off in less than 10 minutes. This video of the blast is a mere 17 (highly dramatic) seconds long:
There's a bunch of big volcanoes up and down the cascade range in the northwest. In the region, we knew Mt. St. Helens was getting ready to blow well ahead of time.
A magnitude 4.2 (Richter Scale) earthquake on March 20, 1980, at 3:47 p.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST), preceded by several much smaller earthquakes beginning as early as March 16, was the first substantial indication of Mount St. Helens' awakening from its 123-year sleep. Earthquake activity increased during the following week, gradually at first and then rather dramatically at about noon on March 25. The number of earthquakes recorded daily reached peak levels in the next 2 days, during which 174 shocks with magnitudes greater than 2.6 were recorded. Many hundreds of smaller earthquakes accompanied these larger events, the largest of which were felt by people living close to the volcano. Aerial observations of Mount St. Helens during the week of seismic buildup revealed small earthquake-induced avalanches of snow and ice, but no sign of an eruption.
With a thunderous explosion, or possibly two nearly simultaneous ones, widely heard in the region at about 12:36 p.m. PST on March 27, Mount St. Helens began to spew ash and steam, marking the first significant eruption in the conterminous United States since that of Lassen Peak, California, from 1914 to 1917. The crown of the ash column rose to about 6,000 feet above the volcano. The initial explosions formed a 250-foot-wide crater within the larger, preexisting snow- and ice-filled summit crater, and new fractures broke across the summit area.
I saw one of the the occasional pre-eruption plumes on a flight from Phoenix to Seattle a month or so ahead of the main event. Much like this from April 1980:
Then, at about 8:30 that Sunday morning, it started to blow:
And a massive landslide began on the north side of the mountain, where it had been growing a bulge since the previous fall.
Here's an official description from the Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument:
Shaken by an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale, the north face of this tall symmetrical mountain collapsed in a massive rock debris avalanche. In a few moments this slab of rock and ice slammed into Spirit Lake, crossed a ridge 1,300 feet high, and roared 14 miles down the Toutle River.
The avalanche rapidly released pressurized gases within the volcano. A tremendous lateral explosion ripped through the avalanche and developed into a turbulent, stone-filled wind that swept over ridges and toppled trees.
It had tremendous force, with the main blast lasting only a few minutes:
The blast column was fifteen miles high. Amongst other things, it disrupted air traffic.
At the same time a mushroom-shaped column of ash rose thousands of feet skyward and drifted downwind, turning day into night as dark, gray ash fell over eastern Washington and beyond. Wet, cement-like slurries of rock and mud scoured all sides of the volcano. Searing flows of pumice poured from the crater. The eruption lasted 9 hours, but Mount St. Helens and the surrounding landscape were dramatically changed within moments. (Source: MSHNVM, again)
Volcanic ash spread long distances, mainly to the east, shown here (L) over
Richland, WA, by the Hanford nuclear facility. I remember a news story that they found some ash in the brake fluid of state trooper cars. Unlike snow, the stuff never melts.
Here's the mountain from the north. This was taken May 17, 1980, the day before the mountain blew its top. Note the notch on the right hand side of the mountain and the foreground slope in the lower left corner for comparison in the post eruption re-photograph that follows.
This was the next fall. Both pictures were taken from the same place, six miles distant from the crater. It has been renamed "Johnston Ridge" in memory of a USGS geologist who was killed by the blast that morning. At six miles distance.
This BBC story gives a good news summary of the eruption:
The blast snapped trees off like toothpicks. Big trees.
Over an area of 240 square miles it did that.
Here's a schematic, from the Mt. St. Helens National Monument (a newer addition to the National Park Service) of various kinds of impact from that day in May:
There was a huge flood/avalanche down the Toutle River. You can see how high it got on the tree trunks where a light-grey residue remains. Please note the person in yellow for scale:
There was debris. Especially trees.
There was ash flow, mixed with mud. Heavy stuff that settled in almost like cement.
I lived in Olympia, WA at the time. And, as it happens, I had plans to see Asleep at the Wheel that night in Portland. But it was not to be. The flow overtopped the I-5 bridge (below) across the Toutle River. The Interstate was closed.. But the band couldn't get there either, and the show got postponed a few days. I came through this area a few days later. Jaw-dropping experience. Indelible memories.
There was some footage got a fair amount of TV play. A house, caught up in the torrent, smashed into that same bridge. It was instantly reduced to splinters.
For more in-depth geekiness, here's 7+ minutes from the US Geological Survey (USGS):
The Toutle River flows into the Cowlitz River, which in turn empties into the grand Columbia River, at which juncture one finds Longview, WA. The ash-laden torrent stopped up the municipal storm sewers of that small city.
ROLL ON, COLUMBIA, ROLL ON
The Columbia River is a mighty, mighty river. It drains a lot of water out of a wet region of the continent, through mountains and canyons and forests. There's logging and mining and agribusiness. It's a major artery for shipping commerce.
Rachel Maddow's been doing a series of promos lately, shot at the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River not far from Las Vegas. The Hoover Dam is a grand structure, no doubt. But the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia is bigger. (Both those dams were New Deal projects, built under FDR's Presidency. As were numerous others.) Back then, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) hired Woody Guthrie to write songs for them. This being one of 'em:
The hydropower from those dams runs aluminum plants along the river shore. Big ships move the output from the various industries.
Thing is, so much volcanic sediment ran into the Columbia that ships ran aground in what had been 42' shipping channel before the eruption, reduced to 14' by volcanic sediment. 31 ships were stranded up stream. The Army Corps of Engineers put a lot of effort into dredging it back out.
There was also a variety of measures, such as sediment dams, to slow down what was washing down the Toutle watershed. Keeping in mind that the headwaters had lost much of its forest vegetation.
Within hours of the eruption, the operators of the Trojan Nuclear plant announced that their facility was "volcano proof."
REALLY?
Fifteen hundred feet of mountain were blown off and 230 square miles of forest were flattened in less than ten minutes. A guy from USGS says "every living thing" in that area died.
Here's a map of how it blew. Keep in mind that this stretch of the Columbia River flows south to north:
It seems to me that had the volcano blown a little more to the west, a little less to the north, the big flows could have blasted down the Kalama River instead. That wouldn't have changed the problems with shipping, just moving them upstream a bit. The thing that's different is that the nuclear power plant, built to use abundant clear water from the Columbia for cooling, is upstream from the Cowlitz River confluence and downstream from the Kalama outflow:
The plant was in operation at the time. I've always figured that its plumbing for cooling would have been every bit as vulnerable as were those storm sewers in Longview. At any rate, the plant quit making electricity in 1993. The tower was eventually demolished.
Years ago, back in the Reagan years, I read an article in the New York Times about a report from some post-Three-Mile-Island Presidential Commission about nuclear waste. The best they could come up with that might keep people away from a still-hot waste storage site 10,000 years in the future was either a gigantic Stonehenge-scale "Mister Yuck" monument, or some kind of revulsion-tinged religious taboo. It was just a best guess: Mostly they went on about how little we know about the people from 10,000 years ago.
The Trojan Nuclear Plant and its big plume of steam are no longer visible along I-5. But the spent fuel is still there, still requiring the Columbia's water to keep it cool. And will continue to need for many, many years to come.
The cooling tower is gone, and that makes it easy to forget that the site still holds all of the most-radioactive waste of Trojan's entire lifetime -- more than 300 tons of spent-uranium fuel rods from Trojan's 16 years of lighting the region's homes and shops.
...
Trojan cost $460 million to build in the 1970s. Its majority owner, Portland General Electric, expects that decommissioning will total another $404million billed to ratepayers over time. Costs cover nonstop security for the hot spent fuel. ... The point is to recall that these self-heating remains still sit where they started, and that is how it has been for years -- in fact, since when I was a reporter covering Trojan's closure in 1993.
Will that site remain "volcano-proof" for all the years it's gonna require a crew to guard the spent fuel, and the crews needed to maintain the cooling system? Hell if I know. But it's not like 1980's the only time it's gonna erupt:
I'd guess its hazardous state might outlive the existence of the "corporate person" that built it. Maybe even more likely than not. This kind of thing definitely doesn't strike me as a sensible business model.
One more time for review. Before:
And after. With a new cone growing in the crater that could blow again while that spent fuel's still dangerously hot.
Nuclear power plants don't all go bad. Maybe just one or two per generation. But the ones that do create sacrifice zones. Akin to Russian Roulette but putting whole regions in jeopardy.
This diary's too long already, so I can't get started on the fate of uranium mineworkers and the landscape and groundwater impacts around uranium mines. Best I can do is ask the question: Is nuclear power needed? Can we really do no better on energy? Is there really no other way to forestall carbon-induced sea level rise and famine and drought and so on?