CHAPTER 159 DAYS BEFORE THE ERUPTION
The thick metal cylinder turned slowly. Day and night, it guided a long, narrow piece of paper moving faithfully underneath a quivering black pen. Day and night, the pen drew an unbroken, straight line.
Until 3:47 p.m.
Far underneath the surface of the earth, rock tore away from rock as a giant slab of the earth’s crust wrested free from its trap. The earth trembled at the tear.
Miles above, the pen that had been steady a moment before jumped to life.
In a basement lab at the University of Washington in Seattle, Linda Noson was the first to notice. She knew as soon as she saw the dark marks streaking across the face of the paper: an earthquake. A big one.
Noson ran upstairs.
“We just got a four,” she told Steve Malone, the head of the seismology lab. “From the Mount Rainier station.”
Malone was up and out of his office the same moment. In the Pacific Northwest, there were thousands of earthquakes each year. But few reached as high as a magnitude 4.
The seismometer on Mount Rainer had registered the earthquake, but that didn’t mean the center of the quake was anywhere near. Seismometers could detect movement of the earth’s crust far from where the instruments were actually located. There had been an earthquake out there—somewhere—but where?
“I bet it’s Mount Hood,” said a student who had joined Noson and Malone.
“I’m thinking it’s St. Helens,” countered Malone, his intuition coming from years working around the mountains.
There was only one way to tell.
Noson was a seismic analyst, an expert in examining the lines and lurches of the recorder’s pen. Straight or jagged, the recorder showed only a black path. Like all of science, it needed humans to translate the data into a meaningful story. Noson went to work.
Taking the paper, she noted times, locations, and magnitudes of movement. She went to her computer and wrote some code, walked a set of punch cards to the mainframe in another building, and waited while it slugged through the calculations.
“Steve’s right,” she said when she walked back into Malone’s office. “It’s Mount St. Helens.”
A call to the Forest Service ranger station on Mount St. Helens confirmed it. Everyone there had felt the quake.
One earthquake—even a big earthquake—could be shaken off. One earthquake, alone, wasn’t much to worry about.
As long as it was only one.
But over the night and into the next day, the earthquakes didn’t stop.
It had been an ordinary, unremarkable Thursday afternoon when the first earthquake rolled the ground. Now the peace was broken.
Malone began to worry about avalanches. There was fresh snow on the ground, and Mount St. Helens was popular with mountain climbers. It might be time to get everyone off the mountain.
But when Malone called the avalanche forecaster to update him on the earthquakes, there was a different question weighing on the forecaster’s mind. They all knew stories of how Mount St. Helens had erupted in the past. Ash had clogged the sky, turning bright day to black midnight. Pumice had rained down. Fire and lava had spewed from the summit. The Toutle River had become so hot that all the fish had died for miles around the mountain. It had happened barely more than a century before.
It could happen again.
“Is there going to be an eruption?” the forecaster asked.
“Well,” Malone replied, “we don’t know. But these earthquakes are continuing. So, sometime. Maybe. There could.”
All weekend, the ground trembled and danced. “Sometime” seemed to grow closer every time the earth shook.
* * *
By Monday, Malone was beginning to panic.
Malone knew seismology. He knew the signs and signals of moving rock. What he didn’t understand were volcanoes.
Luckily, he knew someone who did.
Dwight “Rocky” Crandell and his field partner Donal “Don” Mullineaux were volcanologists who had spent more than two decades studying Mount St. Helens with the United States Geological Survey (USGS). They had often traveled to Washington from their home base in Denver, Colorado, and they knew the mountain well. If something was about to happen, if Mount St. Helens was showing signs of erupting, they would know.
But when Malone first called Crandell to ask him for advice, Crandell’s response was hardly what he was expecting.
“Don’t worry. Don’t worry, Steve,” Crandell said. “The national [seismometer] network located it, and [the earthquake] is thirty kilometers [18.6 miles] away. Not a problem.”
Malone was shocked.
“Woah! Rocky! Hang on. Wait a minute,” Malone exclaimed. “We’ve got a station right at the volcano, on the west flank. And another one about fifty kilometers [31 miles] away … Our locations might be off by one or two kilometers [0.6 or 1.2 miles], but not thirty [18.6 miles]!”
Malone’s instruments were much closer to Mount St. Helens than the USGS’s network; after that first earthquake the week before, Malone had put seismometers directly on the mountain. Malone’s instruments, and Malone’s records, were the most reliable sources of information. To Crandell, the earthquakes appeared too far away for concern; to Malone, it seemed like Crandell was looking at bad data.
“There is no question,” continued Malone, “that this earthquake is located directly under the volcano, slightly to the north of the summit, and at a very shallow depth!”
Slowly, Malone convinced Crandell that the earthquakes were indeed coming from Mount St. Helens. And they were coming faster and stronger every day.
“That got his attention,” Malone remembered.
Crandell had a project in Denver that he couldn’t leave, but his field partner, Mullineaux, was in Washington State the next day.
It was a good thing Mullineaux had come quickly, too. Because on Tuesday night, the earthquake activity increased tremendously. Noson had run up to Malone’s office for a single magnitude 4 earthquake. Now, there were several magnitude 4 earthquakes per hour.
It’s going somewhere, Malone thought to himself.
By Wednesday, the earthquakes were coming even faster. So many strong earthquakes, continuing for so many days, meant that something was going to happen.
“Well,” said Malone, “the next day, it did.”
CHAPTER 2A KEG OF DYNAMITE
“It sounded just like a sonic boom,” said Ferrol Fullmer, who managed a hotel nearby.
At 12:58 p.m. on Thursday, March 27, 1980—one week after earthquakes had begun shaking the mountain—a plume of ash and steam shot seven thousand feet into the air from the top of Mount St. Helens.
On the ground, people stared up and wondered at the noise, but they couldn’t see anything. Clouds covered the mountain’s summit.
“People got on the roofs of buildings for a better view, but it just looked like a lot of black rain clouds,” said Fullmer.
They heard the boom. They knew that the mountain had been shaking. But to people below the clouds, Mount St. Helens looked like it did any other day.
“There was no sign of molten lava,” one newspaper reported, sounding somewhat frustrated.
Not only was there no lava, there was no surge of hot gases rushing down the mountainside. There were no mudflows cascading through the river. There was no ash falling like misplaced snow.
“Mount St. Helens, a lady with a 123-year-old tummyache, erupted with a gigantic volcanic burp,” the Spokesman-Review wrote, condescendingly.
And just like a burp, the plume died off after it made some noise.
If this is what the earthquakes had been leading to, well, everyone was a bit disappointed. A loud “boom” … and that was it. A burp, even a big one, was hardly anything to get upset about.
The clouds made it especially easy to dismiss the steam blast. The only way to see the top of the mountain was to take to the air, and soon, the sky above the summit was full of planes.
It was exciting! It was thrilling! A volcano! There didn’t seem to be any danger. The plume subsided after its initial eruption, and it was a beautiful day. Who wouldn’t want to go see a once-in-more-than-a-hundred-years eruption?
“Dozens of light aircraft, filled with sightseers, journalists, geologists and even the governor—all eager for a peek at a real live volcano, flew through mostly clear skies [above the clouds] surrounding Mt. St. Helens Thursday afternoon,” reported the Spokesman-Review.
Even Governor Dixy Lee Ray hadn’t been concerned when she first heard about the eruption. In nearby Port Ludlow, she had been meeting with the judges of Washington State’s Supreme Court when she was interrupted.
“I might just read you the note that has just been handed to me,” she said, smiling. “We have received information that Mount St. Helens has erupted at 12:58 today,” she continued. “I’ve always said, for many years, that I hoped I lived long enough to see one of our volcanoes erupt. Maybe I soon will get a chance.”
She flew to Mount St. Helens that afternoon.
When her plane landed after circling the top of the volcano, she told the assembled reporters that “we could not see any steam or lava … from what we could see, everything is quiet now.” Still, she agreed that “it was really quite a thrill.”
To the audience in the sky, it seemed like the mountain-turned-volcano was the best event of the season—something to enjoy and not be scared of. But these were tourists. None of them had experience with volcanoes.
There was only one man in the sky that afternoon who had seen an eruption before. He had just happened to be in the area when the earthquakes had started; he had stayed to study what was coming next. David Johnston had a feeling that Mount St. Helens wasn’t done yet.
Johnston was a volcanologist with experience in active volcanoes in Alaska. As a scientist for the USGS, he was usually based in California, but he had been attending a conference in Seattle when the earthquakes began. Over the past week, Malone had put Johnston to work deciphering seismic signals, but Johnston’s specialty was volcanic gases. Now, with the mountain spewing steam and ash, he could really put his knowledge to work.
On the afternoon of the first blast from Mount St. Helens, Johnston stood in a clearing near the forest with his hands stuffed in his pockets. His shaggy, blond hair was caught under a blue knit winter hat, and his checkered flannel coat guarded him from the winter weather that still chilled the air in late March. An easy grin played across his face as he slouched and faced the reporters.
No one would’ve guessed that Johnston hated speaking in front of a crowd. He was so afraid of public speaking that, more than once, he had fainted while giving presentations.
But that fear paled next to the deal the reporters had offered: a view of Mount St. Helens from the sky, in exchange for an on-camera interview.
It was enough to make him smile, even in front of a crowd. Johnston swallowed his fear and climbed aboard the plane.
In the air, they followed the winding path of a river, over the old-growth forests blanketing the landscape below. While they flew beneath the clouds, bare, brown patches of ground were visible where the Weyerhaeuser Logging Company had harvested timber on some of the most profitable land in the country. Soon, though, Johnston and the news crew were rising above the clouds, finally catching sight of the top of the mountain.
The peak of Mount St. Helens, usually pristine with snow, was scarred with gray ash. As they drew closer, the ash resolved into cracks and crevasses, streaking down an otherwise blank, white mountain.
In the plane, every pair of eyes followed the gray lines up. There, at the top of the mountain, they saw it for the first time. A new crater.
“This is 335,” one of the crew said over the radio, announcing their flight number before reporting what he saw. “I’ve got a bit of steam coming out of it, and I’d say it’s probably about, uh, a twelve-hundred-foot crater. It’s open at the very top of the mountain. About twelve-hundred feet by, about, oh, perhaps two hundred feet in the center.”
Long gashes, like wounds in the earth from some terrified beast clawing at a nightmare, raked the ground next to the crater on the mountain top.
“We’ve got a crater,” one of the crew said again. “It appears to just be slowly developing all across the top.”
They circled Mount St. Helens and watched as a small landslide opened the crater a bit wider.
When they came down after the flight, the reporters asked: What did Johnston think? Were the plume of steam and the slowly growing crater the end of the mountain’s drama, or was there more to come? The crowd of tourists in planes seemed to be having a good time, enjoying the spectacle from the air. But what was the real story?
Were the people of Mount St. Helens in danger?
“We’re standing next to a dynamite keg and the fuse is lit,” said Johnston. “I am genuinely afraid of it.”
Copyright © 2024 by Rebecca E. F. Barone