On this day, on a Sunday morning in 1980, I had the great honor to see something not a lot of people in the continental US get to see: an erupting volcano. We’d had plenty of warning, a few rumbles and shakes, and I walked around looking over my shoulder to the north, where the pointed cone of the mountaintop was visible, hoping I saw it erupting in time to take cover somewhere. Nobody really knew what to expect. Occasional puffs of gray smoke and a little soot at the top of its cone were the only visible signs of anything happening at all.
Then on Sunday, May 18th, 1980, at 8:32am, a boom was heard across parts of Portland; I remember that our drummer called the apartment I shared with our lead guitarist and bass player not long after because he felt that boom. We were scheduled to go to the Hawthorne Fred Meyer’s for some reason with our keyboardist that morning. So, parked on the top level of the parking garage at 39th & Hawthorne in Portland, OR, I sat with the big van door opened to the north, to a spectacle I’ll never forget. The sky was literally boiling, with lightning flashes shooting all around the giant ash cloud. Luckily for Portland residents (but unluckily for those to the north and east) the prevailing wind and jet stream blew the ash away from town.
57 people died that day; a geologist, David A. Johnston, got great footage of the north face explosion but was apparently swept away by the following pyroclastic flow of hot ash. Harry Truman, who operated the Mt. St. Helens Lodge (and whose first occupation is listed as “bootlegger”) was buried under 150 ft. of pyroclastic flow along with the place he refused to leave.
Here is a fairly accurate video of the events of, and leading up to, the Mt. St. Helens eruption of May 18th, 1980:
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