Mount St. Helens, 35 years ago, May 18, 1980

From USGS Volcanoes:

Mount St. Helens, 35 years ago, May 18, 1980, 2:30 PM. Nothing looks familiar.

Weyerhaeuser helicopters make the first aerial rescues and fly to assess company camps, roads and railroads. They fly up to check on the camps. Up at Camp Baker, the mud had taken logs, many buses and trucks. Mud spread through higher parts of the camp. It rafts a pickup truck forward like someone driving it. It pushes a yellow crew bus end-on into a four-foot fir; the bus folds like tinfoil. The flow has crushed-in the back doors of the maintenance shops and burst out the front–through all nine equipment bays, the saw shop, the tire shop. Camp Baker, built over four decades, now in three hours is mostly gone. A west breeze clears clouds. They fly up Green River. All trees lay down across thousands of acres. Nothing looks familiar. The blowdown seems incredible, far more of it farther out than seen earlier.

NEXT POST: 2:45 PM

[This and other eyewitness accounts are from In the Path of Destruction, Eyewitness Chronicles of Mount St. Helens, by Richard Waitt, available at http://wsupress.wsu.edu/new-titles.html.]

More on Mount St. Helens athttp://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanoes/st_helens/; images athttp://volcanoes.usgs.gov/…/st_helens_multimedia_gallery.ht….

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