Mountain of Perspective

YAKIMA, Wash. — Mount St. Helens is a mountain of perspective.

To anybody who lived near enough to see its eruption 30 years ago today, it’s a photograph imprinted upon the memory.

Mount St. Helens photographed during the May 18, 1980 eruption looking at the the southwestern slope and the path of ash heading east toward the Yakima area. (USGS photo)

If you were living in Yakima or the Kittitas Valley on May 18, 1980, you probably still have a little vial of the ash that coated your world for the next week.

To a naturalist, Mount St. Helens is an homage to the resiliency of nature — a teeming spectrum of life that rose, quite literally, from the ashes.

The hundreds of scientists who have made careers of studying it see Mount St. Helens as, in the words of one, “perhaps the best global example of a living laboratory.”

To volcanologists and emergency responders around the world, Mount St. Helens is both a teaching tool and a cautionary tale, a stark reminder to share their knowledge — proactively, even insistently — with those who live in their shadows.

To Carolyn Driedger, that springtime Sunday three decades ago is something she still calls “a life-changing event.”

Were it not for the man for whom the Johnston Observatory is named, it might well have been for Driedger what it was for 57 other people, including David Johnston: a life-ending event.
‘Isn’t the safest place to be’

United States Geological Survey scientists Carolyn Driedger at left, and Jeff Wynn discuss where signs for the Cascades Volcano Observatory public open house should be displayed on May 7, 2010 in Vancouver Wash. Driedger helped organize a fun day where the public could interact and learn from scientists leading up to the 30th anniversary of the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Driedger has been studying St. Helens for over 30 years and has helped shape what we know of it. (TJ Mullinax/Yakima Herald-Republic)

Driedger, then a young hydrologist with the United States Geological Survey in 1980, had gone up on May 17 with a colleague to the mountain’s Coldwater Ridge. Their intention was to spend the night on the mountain, then head over the next morning to take measurements at Shoestring Glacier.

Johnston had been monitoring a bulge developing on the side of the mountain — anticipating, contrary to the official USGS prediction, that the eruption would be a lateral blast from that bulge.

“David said this isn’t the safest place to be,” recalls Driedger. “I don’t think anybody realized how catastrophically that bulge was going to fail. We were two glaciologists — what did we know? We took David’s advice and left.”

BEFORE: Mount St. Helens as seen from Johnston's Ridge on May 17, 1980, one day before its most destructive eruption. (USGS photo)

At 8:32 the next morning, Johnston made his famous radio transmission, “Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!” Even six miles from the blast zone, though, he wasn’t far enough away to survive it.

Thanks to Johnston, though, Driedger was. She was 40 miles away in a car on her way to the mountain. Upon seeing the telltale plume of ash, she headed back to the USGS office in Vancouver and began fielding calls, beginning three decades of follow-up, continuing research and outreach efforts.

AFTER: Mount St. Helens as seen from Johnston's Ridge on September 10, 1980, nearly four months after the May 18 eruption. (USGS photo)

The careers of hundreds of scientists, like Driedger, have revolved around Mount St. Helens since that memory day. It was already being monitored when it blew, thereby providing reams of documentation to pore through and learn from in retrospect. And its accessibility from two major metropolitan areas made studying the aftermath a simple process.

“The 1980 eruption,” says Seth Moran, a USGS seismologist based at the service’s David A. Johnston Cascade Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, “was clearly a watershed event for the entire field.”

‘A big petrie dish’

Charlie Crisafulli was just 22 when he came to Washington two months after the 1980 eruption. His entire career has revolved around the rebirth of life at Mount St. Helens — where life itself had seemed unimaginable that first summer when he flew over the devastation.

“We’re talking about forces moving at very high speeds, hundreds of miles per hour, temperatures exceeding 500 to 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit, deposited (buried) anywhere from as little as a foot to 600 feet,” says Crisafulli, 52, a research ecologist with the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station.

“And when you consider the velocity, the temperatures, the poisonous gases, the depth of burial, it wasn’t unreasonable to believe at that time that, geez, most of life will have been snuffed out.

“The big question was, could anything have survived?”

Forest ecologist Charlie Crisafulli holds up a frog — emblematic of the life teeming at Mount St. Helens since the eruption — in this 2007 photograph at Spirit Lake. To see more photos by photographer Vince Patton, go to web.me.com/vincepatton. (Photo courtesy of Vince Patton)

But survivors were everywhere. Glacier lilies pushed through the ash. Salamanders emerged from water pockets beneath the debris. Gophers burrowed out, protected in their tunnels from the blast. Fish in higher-elevation lakes remained safe beneath a layer of snow and ice. Spores, spiders and seeds blew in on the wind and took hold. Others hitchhiked in within the fur or intestinal tract of an animal or a bird.

“They never expected all of the mechanisms by which plants and animals would recover within the area,” says Mark Swanson, an assistant professor of natural resources at Washington State University. “We lost very few plant species at Mount St. Helens — only two, I believe, out of 500 or more plant species. You had all of that plus a whole new assemblage of plants that thrive in disturbed areas.”

Most remarkable about this resurgence of life was its beginnings throughout the blast zone — not at its edges.

“We had anticipated this would be a very, very slow process of getting plants and animals back on the landscape, and it would happen way, way out and be this inward march like like an advancing front of soldiers, slowly moving and advancing into the disturbed area,” Crisafulli says. “But that’s not what happened at all.”

Instead, life grew from little pockets of living organisms that had either persisted within the blast zone or had colonized within it. Where life persisted, it flourished, creating habitat and prey for even more plants and animals.

“Mount St. Helens was like a big petrie dish,” Crisafulli says. “Organisms would come in and inoculate it with seeds and spores and other forms of life.”
Exiting that ivory tower

Mount St. Helens’ “living laboratory” led to scientific breakthroughs and better understanding in many areas, among them volcano preparedness. But the focus on sharing that particular knowledge didn’t hit home until later.

Before 1980, said Steve Malone, a professor emeritus of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington, his department “didn’t do any outreach. Virtually none. If somebody called us up we would talk to them, but it was usually considered a bother.

“If nothing else, 1980 certainly changed our way of doing our role, totally. We can’t just live in our ivory tower and enjoy the academic pursuit of knowledge and science. We have an obligation of getting information that’s useful out to anybody who could be impacted.”

In 1982, the USGS opened the Cascades Volcano Observatory and began developing comprehensive response plans for each of the 13 volcanoes in the Cascade Range. The mandate for immediate international response, though, didn’t come until a preventable disaster three years later.

That November of 1985, a snow-capped volcano in the Colombian Andes called Nevado del Ruiz erupted. The eruption itself wasn’t catastrophic, but it triggered a flow of volcanic material, melted snow and mud — a lahar — that picked up debris and grew as it traveled 2 1/2 hours down through a valley to the town of Armeno, roughly 45 miles away.

It was the middle of the night, and a storm had caused power outages. Officials from nearby towns tried in vain to alert Armeno, but even those townspeople who knew the lahar was coming didn’t know what to do.

“It turned out a lot of those people could have walked a mile to higher ground and been safe,” Carolyn Driedger says. “Instead, many were fearful and ran to the river’s edge where the cathedral was, and many of them were buried in the cathedral.”

Some 23,000 people — three-quarters of Armeno’s population — died that night.
Proactive, all the way

“There’s a saying in the emergency management community,” Seth Moran says. “A crisis is a bad time to be exchanging business cards.”

Following the Nevado del Ruiz tragedy, preparation and warning measures became the USGS standard. Almost immediately, the Survey and the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance combined to put together a team of specialists and a portable observatory that could be dispatched to an awakening volcano around the world.

Mount St. Helens and the lessons it taught — such as the small earthquakes that can occur before and during the building of a dome, giving scientists insights into what type of eruption may be coming — have paid off ever since.

Perhaps the best example of the USGS’s newly proactive focus was the agency’s on-the-ground readiness prior to the massive 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. An estimated 300 people died, but as many as 20,000 lives were saved by massive evacuations called for the USGS in cooperation with local authorities.

The “mandate to try to bring up awareness and response capability,” Steve Malone says, “was a major thing that grew out of (Mount St. Helens).”

Washington- and Oregon-based volcano experts now routinely travel to far corners of the world to prepare others for volcanoes or recover from them. And that expertise isn’t confined to volcanic events; Crisafulli and others have also consulted on ecological restoration related to strip mining and clear-cut logging. Mount St. Helens, after all, rewrote the book on forest redevelopment.

And that knowledge base is still growing. Scientists from around the world still gravitate to Mount St. Helens, ensuring a steady diet of new discoveries, improved data and technological advances coming out of the world’s most extensively studied volcano.

“Mount St. Helens is changing every day,” said Jeanne Bennett, executive director of the Mount St. Helens Institute. “We think 30 years is a huge, long time and there can’t be anything left to study. But the reality is it’s still changing every single day.

“So we have to keep watching it and keep learning from it.”

• Outdoors editor Scott Sandsberry can be reached at 509-577-7689 or ssandsberry@yakimaherald.com

• Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect a date correction.