Will She Spit Thunder Eggs?

Washington's Mount St. Helens erupts spectacularly

"I've always said I wanted to live long I enough to see one of our volcanoes erupt," said Dixy Lee Ray, the Governor of Washington. She got her wish last week when Mount St. Helens, a peaceful-looking 9,677-ft. peak in the white-topped Cascade Range, suddenly spewed out a spectacular 20,000-ft. plume of gas and ash. The eruption was the first in the continental U.S. since 1914, when Mount Lassen, part of the Cascades in Northern California, came to life. Said Robert Tilling of the U.S. Geological Survey: "It's fabulous! We can actually monitor the reawakening of a dormant volcano with modern instrumentation. We're going to get a much better handle on our whole model of how the earth behaves."

Scientists were not surprised when Mount St. Helens began to rumble. The Cascades form the most volcanically active mountain range in the U.S., excluding Hawaii and Alaska. Comparatively young, they are still being shaped by forces deep within the earth. Mount St. Helens, a mere 37,000 years old ("A baby in geologic terms," said a seismologist), is one of the youngest in the range. It last erupted in 1857. Studying the evidence of explosions during the past 4,500 years, Geological Survey scientists predicted in 1978 that the symmetrical peak, visible from Portland 40 miles to the southwest, would blow before the year 2000. Two weeks ago the mountain was shaken by a sharp earthquake, followed by a series of tremors. Then came another jolt. Suddenly last Thursday, the silence on the snow-covered slopes was shattered by an explosion that was heard 40 miles away. Said Barry Blair, a logger cutting timber twelve miles from the peak: "There were two little booms and then one great big one. It got real smoky and we discovered we were covered with ash."

Streaked by lightning, a black and white plume soared high above the cloud cover around the peak. Scientists who rushed to the mountain discovered that a crater 200 ft. wide by 250 ft. long had opened near the mountain's northern crest. Three hundred loggers working on the slopes, 50 forest rangers and their families and 60 residents of the tiny village of Spirit Lake (pop. 100), located at 3,200 ft., were evacuated. One defiant oldtimer, Harry Truman, 83, operator of the Mount St. Helens Lodge less than two miles from the crater, said he would stick it out. Truman's view: "That mountain just doesn't dare blow up on me."

At the town of Cougar, twelve miles from the peak, people gathered in the A & R Grocery to share the latest news about the eruption. Fire Chief Richard Slayton informed the residents that if conditions got worse, they would have to retreat to a school four miles away. Many residents, at first determined to stay, grew uneasy as the rumbling continued.

By week's end no lava had appeared, although there was still that possibility. There was another danger: the heat of the volcano might melt the 16-ft. snow cover on the mountain, flooding streams and causing massive mud slides. As a precaution, water levels in three reservoirs on the nearby Lewis River were lowered. Meanwhile, scientists and residents kept watching anxiously to see just how angry Mount St. Helens would get. Said Kurt Austermann of the U.S. Forest Service: "We don't want to panic anybody, but nobody really knows whether it's going to start spitting thunder eggs or just lay down and go back to sleep."

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