"God I Want To Live!"

God, I Want to Live!"

Mount St. Helens explodes, spreading death and destruction in the Cascades "Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it!" The frantic warning was radioed at precisely 8:31 a.m. on that fateful Sunday by Volcano Expert David Johnston, 30, who had climbed to a monitoring site five miles from Washington State's Mount St. Helens in the snow-capped Cascade Range, 40 miles northeast of Portland, Ore. He wanted to peer through binoculars at an ominous bulge building up below the crater, which had been rumbling and steaming for eight weeks, and report his observations to the U.S. Geological Survey center in Vancouver, Wash.

Seconds after his shouted message, a stupendous explosion of trapped gases, generating about 500 times the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, blew the entire top off Mount St. Helens. In a single burst St. Helens was transformed from a postcard-symmetrical cone 9,677 ft. high to an ugly flattop 1,300 ft. lower.

Clouds of hot ash made up of pulverized rock were belched twelve miles into the sky. Giant mud slides, composed of melted snow mixed with ash and propelled by waves of superheated gas erupting out of the crater, rumbled down the slopes Hiroshima, crashed through valleys, leaving millions of trees knocked down in rows, as though a giant had been playing pick-up sticks.

At the moment of the explosion David Crockett, 28, a photographer for KOMO-TV in Seattle, stood on a logging road at the base of the mountain. He heard a huge roar and looked up to see a wall of mud rushing toward him. Because of the terrain, the flood divided into two streams that passed on either side of him. Seeking desperately for a way out, Crockett kept moving along the road, speaking into his sound camera to record his impressions of the scene. Said he: "I am walking toward the only light I can see. I can hear the mountain rumble. At this very moment I have to say, 'Honest to God, I believe I am dead.' The ash in my eyes burns my eyes, burns my eyes! Oh dear God, this is hell! It's very, very hard to breathe and very dark. If I could only breathe air. God, just give me a breath! I will try the radio. Mayday! Mayday! Ash is coming down on me heavily. It's either dark or I am dead. God, I want to live!"

Crockett did live; a rescue helicopter plucked him off the mountain ten hours later. But Johnston was never heard from again. His campsite was strewn with boulders, broken tree trunks and ash with the consistency of wet cement. By week's end at least 18 people were known to have died in the eruption; at least 71 were reported missing and feared dead. Among them was Harry Truman, a crusty 84-year-old who lived with 16 cats at a recreation lodge near Spirit Lake, about five miles north of the peak. He had refused to leave weeks ago, he had told national television audiences, because, he said, "no one knows more about this mountain than Harry, and it don't dare blow up on him."

Harry was last seen on Saturday evening, watering his lawn. Today the site of his camp is a steaming mass of mud and water.

Air Force and Army National Guard helicopters lifted 130 survivors to safety. Officials doubted that this count would go up; the last person found alive on the mountain was flown out on Tuesday. By Red Cross count, mud slides destroyed 123 homes in the town of Toutle and its surrounding area, along with bridges, roads and all other signs of human habitation.

The eruption of Mount St. Helens, which began in a minor way on March 27, was the first in the continental U.S. since the Cascades' Mount Lassen, 400 miles to the south, spit up a shower of mud and stones in 1914. Had last week's explosion occurred in a heavily populated area, the loss of life would have been awesome. Geologists estimated that St. Helens spewed out about 1.5 cubic miles of debris, a blast on about the same order of magnitude as the one in A.D. 79 from Italy's Vesuvius, which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum with ash and mud.

As it was, the eruption blew down 150 sq. mi. of timber worth about $200 million, caused an estimated $222 million in damage to wheat, alfalfa and other crops as far east as Missoula, Mont., and buried 5,900 miles of roads under ash. Clearing them could cost another $200 million. The blast created a 20-mile log jam along the Columbia River that blocked shipping between Longview, Wash., and Astoria, Ore. Volcanic mud carried by the river choked the harbor of Portland. Officials estimated that the ports would lose $5 million a day until dredges could clear a new channel through the silt, which in some places reduced the depth of the harbor from 40 ft. to 14 ft. Not all the long-range effects of the blast, particularly to the region's ecological balance, can yet be calculated. For example, the eruption killed a million fingerlings (baby fish) in a hatchery at Toutle, and there were fears that ash on the leaves of plants would interfere with photosynthesis, the process by which plants turn sunlight into nutrients.

As winds carried the eruption's debris northeast from the shattered mountain, thick layers of ash, looking like dirty snow, fell on eastern Washington. Yakima, a town of 50,000 located 85 miles east of the volcano, experienced midnight at noon. The mining and ranching communities of the Idaho panhandle and western Montana turned into ghostly towns in which nobody could move about the dust-choked streets without surgical masks or some substitute: handkerchiefs, bandanas, even coffee filters strapped over nose and mouth with rubber bands. Schools, factories and most stores and offices closed. Highways were closed and airports were shut down because of near zero visibility, stranding thousands of frightened travelers. Mail deliveries were halted. Electricity was curtailed until workers could clean ash from generators.

Closer to the mountain, the eruption blasted twelve miles of the once pristine north fork of the Toutle River into a lifeless moonscape. Herds of black-tailed deer, bobcats and cougars used to swarm through the valley's hemlock and Douglas fir; elk still wandered in hopeless confusion through the ashen desolation. The river and its source, Spirit Lake, once teemed with steelhead trout and Chinook salmon. All were destroyed by the eruption. TIME Correspondent Paul Witteman was one of the first journalists to see the area by helicopter after the blast. His report:

"The Huey chopper, piloted by National Guard Captain Harold Ward, went up the south fork of the Toutle, which had turned into a caramel ribbon, toward the peak, still shrouded in clouds of steam and ash. The mocha-colored terrain appeared otherworldly, a madly undulating landscape. The trees looked as if they had been strewn across the foothills by a careless child. As we passed over Baker Camp, a logging base, we spotted a pickup truck, a dead child lying face upward in the back. Ward swung the Huey over a huge mudhole that had once been Spirit Lake, a body of water so clear that it mirrored St. Helens like a reflecting pool, then did slow loops around another pickup truck on a nearby ridge. The truck's passenger must have had a perfect view of the terrifying blast. Seconds later, both passenger and driver were dead, probably from the heat and poisonous gas. As the Huey made another pass, the peak spouted ash 14,000 ft. into the atmosphere, a mini-replay of Sunday's monster explosion."

Within four days the worst was over --maybe. The dust had settled in the heavy-fallout area, roughly from the ruptured peak to as far east as Montana. Fine ash particles, mostly glasslike silica, had spread in a gigantic, banana-shaped arc in the stratosphere across the nation and will slowly dissipate into invisible clouds after blowing round the world several times. Outside the Northwestern U.S., people will probably notice nothing more than some spectacularly colorful dawns and sunsets over the next several months.

But there was a possibility of another natural disaster. A 200-ft. wall of mud and ash from the volcano prevented the waters of Spirit Lake from flowing into the Toutle River. Local officials feared at first that the dam might suddenly give way, sending backed-up water and mud flooding through the riverbank towns of Longview, Kelso and Castle Rock, menacing the lives of 50,000 people. By the weekend, however, water was slowly seeping through the mud-and-ash plug, and pressure on the dam had eased.

At the same time, there were further rumblings from Mount St. Helens, indicating that molten rock was once again moving inside the mountain. Geologists hoped that the monstrous blast had vented sufficient gas to prevent another major eruption. But they simply do not know enough about volcanoes to make any firm predictions.

Four days after the blast, President Carter decided to inspect the devastated area. After a night in Portland, he climbed into the first of a flotilla of eight helicopters, packed with Cabinet officers, Senators, Congressmen and local government officials, including Governors Dixy Lee Ray of Washington and John Evans of Idaho. From the air Carter could not see the still-smoking peak of Mount St. Helens. It was hidden by rain clouds. But as his chopper flew at treetop level, he was astonished by the colorless landscape.

After his 1-hr. 15-min. tour, Carter excitedly told reporters: "The moon looks like a golf course compared to what's up there." At a meeting with townspeople in Vancouver, the President was being briefed by experts on the economic damage of the eruption when Governor Ray interrupted. "This is all very interesting," she said, "but the top priority is people." Replied Carter: "What do you need specifically?" Ray spelled out her answer: "M-O-N-E-Y." In fact, before leaving Washington, D.C., Carter had declared the mountain's vicinity a federal disaster area, making residents eligible for low-interest federal loans to rebuild their shattered houses and businesses. In addition, he rather oddly suggested that residents might eventually make some money from the catastrophe. Said he: "People will come from all over the world to observe the impressiveness of the force of nature.

I would say it would be, if you'll excuse the expression, a tourist attraction that would equal the Grand Canyon."

Mount St. Helens is something of a baby among volcanoes. It was born a mere 37,000 years ago, which is scarcely more than an instant in geological time. The mountain last erupted in 1857, when the area was an uninhabited wilderness. Last week's blowup ranked as middling, as volcanic eruptions go. But the people who stumbled off St. Helens' slopes, or were plucked to safety by helicopters, told tales that rivaled wartime survivor stories.

If the blast had occurred 24 hours later, it could have wiped out a crew of some 200 Weyerhaeuser Co. loggers who were to begin felling trees at 7:30 a.m. Monday. Many of the loggers lived with their families near the north fork of the Toutle River. Logger George Fickett was at home when the mountain erupted. Said he: "I heard the goldangest noise, like someone upending a bunch of barrels down the road. There was a roar, like a jet plane approaching, and a lot of snapping and popping. Those were the trees. We got out fast."

On the mountain were several geologists, hikers and campers. Those that rose with the sun reported that the morning was exceptionally quiet; no birds sang. Oddly enough, when the mountain blew, many of the survivors never heard the explosion, perhaps because concussive waves can travel faster than sound; by the time the sound reached them, they were too shaken to notice it.

Bruce Nelson and Sue Ruff, from nearby Kelso, had pitched tents at the Green River campground with four young friends. On Saturday they hiked through what Ruff called "an enchanted forest of moss and pine" and then set up tents 30 miles from the peak. On Sunday Nelson, Ruff and Terry Crall were beginning morning chores when they felt a searing wind. Recalled Nelson: "We were just cooking breakfast when my buddy said, 'Oh my God, the mountain blew!' " Ruff added, "We saw this thick yellow-and-black cloud rushing toward us. I remember thinking, 'I should take a picture of it.' Then I thought we'd better hide."

Crall raced into a tent to wake Karen Varner, and Nelson wrapped his arms around Ruff as trees fell around them and hot ash rained down. Said Nelson: "We were buried. Then Sue and I started digging our way out of the ash, which was so hot that it burned our hands. Our mouths were full of mud. I told Sue we were going to die, and she said, 'Nonsense.' " As they crawled out from under the trees and ash, they began to gag from the gases in the air and had to cover their mouths with their sweatshirts; stones hailed down and raised bumps on their heads.

When at last the darkness began to lift, Nelson and Ruff began looking for their friends. They saw nothing but ashes and logs where Varner's tent had been; she and Crall later were found dead. The two other members of the camping group, Dan Balch and Brian Thomas, were alive --barely. Burned skin hung loose from Balch's shoulders to his hands, and he was in shock. He was unable to walk. Thomas, wearing only the long john bottoms in which he had been sleeping, was lying dazed under a log. Nelson and Ruff hauled him out, helped him walk to an old mine shack nearby and built over the entrance a barricade of logs to protect their friend from any further ash falls.

Then Nelson and Ruff began what turned into a 15-mile, ten-hour trek away from the mountain, over what Nelson calls a "white-hot desert" of ash. They soon joined up with a 60-year-old man. The three kept up their spirits by singing bawdy songs. In late afternoon they heard helicopters overhead and waved some of their clothes to stir up a dust cloud large enough to attract the pilot's attention. They were rescued, and choppers soon carried out Balch and Thomas as well.

Roald Reitan, 19, and his friend Venus Dergen, 20, of Tacoma, Wash., had been camping next to a good fishing hole in the Toutle River, about 23 miles downstream from Spirit Lake. They were awakened by a rumbling noise from the river, which was covered by felled trees. The pair ran to Reitan's car, but water from the rising river poured over the road, preventing them from driving away. Then a tide of mud crashed through the forest toward the car. Reitan and Dergen climbed to the roof of the car. That got them above the mud, but only momentarily. The mud slide toppled the car over the bank and into the river.

Reitan and Dergen leaped off the roof and fell into the river, by now a boiling mass of logs, mud, pieces of a collapsed train trestle and what Reitan described as "hot bath water." Said he: "I thought we had had it. Venus was stuck between logs, and disappeared several times. I kept climbing over logs to reach her. We were lucky that the logs opened up and I could pull her out." The two were carried about a mile down the river before a family of campers spotted them and heard Reitan calling for help. It took the rescuers about 45 minutes to crawl across the mud and logs and pull Reitan and Dergen to safety.

Mike Moore of Castle Rock, Wash., his wife Lu and their two daughters, four-year-old Bonnielu and three-month-old Terra Dawn, were on a hike along the Green River trail, about 13 miles north of Mount St. Helens, when the volcano erupted. "The sky turned as black as I've ever seen, and ash and pumice fell on us like black rain," said Lu Moore. "Then the air pressure changed, and our ears went pop, pop, pop."

The family scrambled into a nearby shack, waited two hours and emerged to find themselves in a wasteland of ash and fallen trees. They started off to find their car, but the trail had been obliterated, and they had no idea where to look. So they pitched a tent and settled in for what turned out to be a 30-hour wait, munching on survival rations from their packs and sleeping on the ash. Around noon on Monday, an Air Force helicopter pilot spotted them. Said the pilot, Sgt. Earl Edwards: "The area they were in looked like somebody had dropped the Bomb. I was shocked to see anybody there alive."

Farther away from the mountain, Northwesterners who were never in any danger heard what many at first thought were sonic booms and then saw a spectacular--and frightening--drama in the sky. Said Harvey Olander, a retired geologist who now cultivates a 40-acre apple orchard outside Yakima: "I was working on an irrigation ditch. The sky got dark, and I thought we had a hailstorm coming. Then it got deathly still, and all you could see through the darkness was the purple-pink glow of sheet lightning." Said Chuck Taylor, a reporter for the Tri-City Herald in Pasco, Wash., who was at the Hanford nuclear complex 140 miles from St. Helens: "It looked exactly like a tornado bearing down."

In Spokane, Wash., Jean Penna, 32, a corporate assistant at the Sheraton-Spokane Hotel, was driving to Seattle when she decided to stop first at her mother's home a few blocks from her own. Said she: "In the time it took me to get from my apartment to my mother's house, it went black. All of a sudden this powder began to fall, just like snow. It was 75 degrees outside and pitch black." When she left her apartment complex, she said, several of her friends were sunbathing. "You've got people out there sunbathing," she marveled, "and the sky starts falling."

For all the devastation, however, the long-range effects--if St. Helens does not explode again--are likely to be less drastic than was at first feared. Great though its force was, the explosion was not so powerful as many volcanic eruptions of the past, nor did it spill out gases as noxious as those released by the more famous killer eruptions of history. Scientists predicted that St. Helens will cause little long-range damage to human health and the world's climate.

People exposed to the dust, even hundreds of miles away, suffered temporary discomfort: dry and itchy noses, throats and eyes. Reported a resident of Missoula: "I feel like someone popped my eyeballs out and rolled them around in a sandbox." But most of the ash particles were too large to lodge in human lungs and permanently scar them. Moreover, the dust did not stay in the air long enough to cause silicosis, which is a lung disease that miners, masonry workers, sandblasters and toilers in similar occupations get from breathing dust-laden air over long periods of time.

The volcano is also producing fallout, literally. Geologists noted that Mount St. Helens is venting radioactive radon gas in greater quantities than any "hot" discharge from Pennsylvania's crippled Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Fortunately the gas has a short half-life (3.8 days) and quickly climbs high into the sky before it can affect people.

Volcanic dust in the upper atmosphere reflects sunlight away from the earth and lowers temperatures. The cloud released by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia was so dense that it made 1816 in much of the U.S. "the year without a summer." Nothing comparable is likely to happen because of Mount St. Helens. Meteorologists estimate that its cloud of ash will reduce world temperatures by only a tiny fraction of a degree Fahrenheit--a deviation that will be too slight for people to notice.

The economic effects will be somewhat greater, but not catastrophic. Though trees worth at least $ 1 billion were flattened--including 4% of Weyerhaeuser's total timberlands--executives expect to salvage about 80% of the logs by sawing those not badly scorched into usable lumber. Sportsmen who venture into what was once prime fish and game area on the mountain's flanks will find nearly all life wiped out within a 15-mile radius of the crater. The rivers and state-run fish hatcheries near the mountain have been ruined as breeding grounds for steelhead trout and Chinook salmon. Said Mike Wharton, an employee of the Washington State department of game: "We've lost millions of fish." When might the area recover? Replied Wharton, 28: "Not in my lifetime."

Crops within three miles of the crater were destroyed. Downwind, in a triangular swath stretching 200 miles to the east, about 10% of the crops suffered some damage from the dust. Several fields of alfalfa and wheat in eastern Washington were flattened by the weight of ash. When wetted by rains, like those that fell four days after the blast, ash on the ground forms a thick cement-like glop that young shoots may be unable to break through.

Still, the overall damage to wheat in Washington, Idaho and Montana, and to Washington's abundant cherries and apples, is likely to be minor. Alfred Halvorson, a soil expert at Washington State University, believes farmers will lose no more crops than they would to a "very heavy dust storm." Some scientists feared at first that the ash might produce a devastating acid rain, but tests showed that the dust is about as acid as orange juice. The ash contains no more sulfur than ordinary rainwater does.

Any shortfall in Washington wheat production should be made up by bumper crops expected in Oklahoma, Texas and the Plains states. Though wheat prices rose a bit on the Chicago Board of Trade last week, at a time when they normally would be falling, traders were worried not about the St. Helens eruption but about drought in North Dakota.

Except in the immediate vicinity of the mountain, livestock escaped almost unscathed. State officials advised ranchers to put out fresh hay so that cattle would not eat the dusty forage in the fields. Ranchers were also told not to move their herds to avoid increasing the cattle's breathing rate and thus their intake of silica-laden dust. Breeders protected valuable race horses by keeping them inside barns with towels over their noses.

Probably the most lasting and pervasive effect of the eruption, outside the immediate area of Mount St. Helens, will be the monumental nuisance of the cleanup. Volcanic ash fell in amounts estimated at eight tons per acre in the Moscow-Pullman area of Idaho, 300 miles from Mount St. Helens, and 350 Ibs. per acre in southwestern Montana, roughly 400 miles away. The fine, gritty ash drifted into everything: aircraft engines, sewage and water treatment plants, tractor gears, washing machines. One official at Washington State University warned homemakers to use only detergents when washing clothes because soap might mix with ash in the water, forming a sludge that would hopelessly clog the outlet hoses of automatic washing machines.

Throughout Washington, Idaho and Montana, officials cautioned motorists to stay off the roads except for emergencies because the passage of an auto stirs up clouds of dust that blind other drivers. Motorists also were advised to clean air and oil filters every 20 or 25 miles. Some drivers tied pantyhose over their cars' air filters to help keep out the dust. Nonetheless, insurance companies will soon be deluged with claims from the owners of countless autos whose windshields and finishes were pitted by the ash.

On streets and in backyards, the ash is also a headache. At the airport in Spokane (pop. 250,000), which was covered by half an inch of dust, a neon sign said:

REJOICE, IT IS ASH WEDNESDAY. City officials requested citizens to hose down the streets in front of their houses, and the city council passed an ordinance requiring residents to get rid of the ash in ten days or face fines and short jail sentences. Said Evelyn Erdely, 20, a student at Spokane Falls Community College: "I have a cough, I'm sneezing a lot and I feel icky. My dad is out with the hose washing off the house all the time."

In Pullman (pop. 21,000), students from Washington State University jammed the Barley and Hops tavern for "eruption specials," $1 pitchers of beer. In Yakima, which was coated with half an inch of dust, the owner of an auto body shop jokingly put ash on sale for 500 per gal. but got no takers. Hosing or shoveling the ash was only a slightly more effective way of getting rid of it. Complained Yakima Mayor Betty Edmondson: "Wet ash turns into a slurry that is just about impossible to shovel."

One of the hardest-hit towns outside the immediate vicinity of the volcano was Ritzville, Wash, (pop. 2,000). A current of warm, dust-laden air from the west collided with cold air from the east and dumped 5 in. of ash on the town. Reported TIME Correspondent James Willwerth: "If Spokane looked like an ashtray, Ritzville looked as though it had been hit by an avalanche. The town was caked in dust and mud. Streets had 2-ft. drifts. On South Adams Street, Mrs. Erma Miller's once meticulously landscaped ranch-style house looked as if it were in a desert. The lawn had disappeared almost completely. Branches were broken from two formerly flowering hawthornes. There was a 4-ft. drift on the patio. Said Mrs. Miller, leaning on her snow shovel: 'You ought to see the inside. You can't keep the dust out.' "Within hours of the storm, 2,500 stranded motorists sought refuge in Ritzville. Schools and churches were turned into shelters; 81 people slept on the floor of Perkins Restaurant, and many families took in strangers for a night or two. On Tuesday morning Adams County Sheriff Ron Snowden let 75 motorists try to drive out, after a compressor at the firehouse was used to blow the cars' air cleaners free of dust. Only 20 made it. Twenty-five returned to Ritzville. The rest were stranded on the highway and had to seek refuge at a rest stop. During the worst of the storm, cars could run only about half an hour in the Ritzville area before stalling.

"Adams County Auditor Kim Yerxa estimated that cleaning up Ritzville and the rest of the county will cost $2 million; the annual budget is only twice that sum. To clear Ritzville's streets, Sheriff Snowden directed a fire truck to spray the ash so that a road grader could push it into 3-ft.-high dikes. They, in turn, were shoveled up by road crews. But Snowden predicted that it will be a year before the town is free of ash."

For months ahead, residents of Ritzville and a large slice of the Northwest will have to live with the ash, a visible reminder of the titanic forces of nature that shape the earth. To volcano experts Mount St. Helens may be a baby and its eruption second-rate. But to the people in its path it was a catastrophe. qed

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