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Mt. St. Helens, what are your memories?? Triggered by Rocky's volcano topic!
dreher
Member Posts: 8,886 ✭✭✭✭
I was living in the NW corner of Ohio when Mt. St. Helens blew up. Obviously, to me, on that day it was only a news story. I don't remember how many days later but the NW corner of Ohio became quite overcast because of all the ash between NW Ohio and the Sun. The ash in the atmosphere lasted quite awhile. I was amazed that an explosion from way over a thousand miles away could pump that amount of ash into the atmosphere.
I am blown away that the climate change people think us pathetic excuses called humans actually have the power to affect our climate. Sorry guys, the Lord can do what he wonts with the climate. We are just along for the ride.
Comments
One of my memories from that day. I took this picture about 3 hours after it blew.
A dark blanket came across the sky and it started dropping huge ash flakes. We drove home with the headlights on, it was like a blizzard. We parked the car for a month so the ash wouldn’t destroy the engine and the ash got about 6” deep everywhere. I was in college at the time and they canceled classes so we’d volunteer for cleanup, They’d hose the ash to wet it, and we used coal shovels to fill garbage cans. I was on the college racquetball team and we still had practices but they couldn’t run the fans to move air and cool the courts so we sweated our butts off. Eventually the ash blew away or got rained into the ground but you can still scratch around under the ponderosa pines and find big grey deposits. People still make Christmas tree ornaments and glassy objects from the ash.
I remember thinking I am glad I do not live close
also the old fellow who refused to leave , and well he got to stay
Here on the east coast it was only a news story event .
Yep Harry, the cranky old cuss up on the Toutle river. There's a restaurant here in Anchorage named after him.
I remember having to wash my van several times to remove the ash. It was too tall to put in the garage, so it stayed in the driveway.
Joe
Lived in Montana. Took the ash 12 hours to get there. We got about one half inch. Weird thing to experience, but once in a lifetime is quite enough. I worked in the timber industry, and that ash was death on saw chain. It built up on limbs where they connect to the trunk, and was a problem for years.
After I moved to Washington, I knew some guys who worked at cleaning up those massive hill sides of timber we've all seen in the pictures. Those trees look like toothpicks in those pictures, but they are old growth trees that are 3'-7' through. That was a nightmare to buck that stuff as they're all wound together and under tremendous pressure. That was also real death on saw chains. They had to use carbide tooth chain, but after about two days the ash had all the rivets worn out, and the chain would just fall apart.
I also know a guy who lost a brother in the blast. He was falling timber for Weyerhaeuser . He was never found, but they did find his pickup.
Other than the earthquake that cracked the foundation of the home I was living in (and grew up in) there wasn't much that affected me or where we lived very much as we were well north of the eruption and the ash clouds went east. But my grandparents narrowly escaped it all as they had left our home to theirs in the Portland, OR area shortly before it happened. My best friend's dad had the engine in his pickup ruined by ash. My wife and her family lived well east of the blast and they had about an inch of ash to contend with.
And fiery auto crashes
Some will die in hot pursuit
While sifting through my ashes
Some will fall in love with life
And drink it from a fountain
That is pouring like an avalanche
Coming down the mountain
I was serving in the US ARMY in Germany when it blew, we heard some about it, I wasn't back stateside until October of that year and by then it was pretty much over.
No volcanoes in SC. Only watched on TV
"Yep Harry, the cranky old cuss up on the Toutle river. There's a restaurant here in Anchorage named after him."
Harry Truman lived in a beautiful lodge on Spirit Lake. He had been a soldier, logger, bootlegger and hunter. Imagine the stories he could have told to the membership of GBGD. When I was a lad, my Dad would take the whole family camping there for a week each summer. We'd rent a boat from Harry and fish for trout in the lake. Harry had lived in "his" lodge, on "his" lake, at the foot of "his" mountain for most of his adult life. He brought his family there in 1926 and built the lodge in 1939. To leave would have meant the end of life, as he knew it. We see that every year as people refuse to evacuate ahead of hurricanes, floods, wildfires, etc. Harry was hit by a superheated, pyroclastic blast, traveling hundreds of miles per hour, before he and the lodge were swept into the (probably) boiling waters of Spirit lake. He might have barely felt the rumble before his life ended, on "his" terms. We should all be so blessed! RIP
I was 11 y.o., living in Amarillo, TX............I threw the afternoon paper every day after school (do you all remember when there was a morning and afternoon paper?), and of course, I saw the front page headlines as I rolled and banded the papers before loading the canvas bag on the handlebars of my bicycle. I got quite an education just from 6 years of doing that.
Anyway, it was just a front page story to me............we were not physically affected by it.
I was stretched out on the floor listening to the radio Sunday morning and the room shook.. It was a few minutes later that the news interrupted the music and the sky started to turn dark. An hour or so later the "rain" of dust and ash began to fall.
Fortunately for me, most of it all went east. It sure messed up a bunch of cars and trucks...no one was prepared for that mess ! The west side got it's share of mud and misery too, but that all happened down in the south part of the state.