When Mount St. Helens Blew Its Top

Mount St. Helen's is a lovely sight to behold, but was a pretty scary thing to be around in the Spring of 1980. Listen in to the harrowing story today!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
and there's Chuck and sitting in for Jerry today is
our great friend and co producer Dave c and the

(00:21):
sea stands for cool. Say hello, David, everybody, that's pretty.
That's a really great Dave impression. He's a he's a troll. Yes,
I always hear him is wal wal wal walt wal Uh.
Dave is great. I wish you all knew him, but
we do, and so he's ours. You're gonna have to
take our word for it. That's right, speaking of take

(00:44):
our word for it, Chuck, I have to say to
all the people who don't know much about Mount St.
Helen's prepared to have your socks knocked off, or your
lid blown or your skin seared off of your your muscle. Yeah,
this is a good one. This is uh. I mean,
this is so bread and butter stuff you should know
it is. I don't know why it took us almost

(01:04):
sixteen years to get to it. And none of that
margarine stuff are low fat. It's like full milk fat butter.
Bread and butter stuff you should know salted butter, even
you like salted Huh. It depends on what you're using
it for. I like just plain unsalted butter, even on
a bread and butter piece of like bread with butter. Yeah,
mainly with like baking and cooking. It's like that's when

(01:27):
it matters. Yeah, I got too. Um, what's your brand?
Oh boy? It depends. I mean I love to get
the hate to be that guy, but I dude, love
to get the local butter when we get to our
farmer's market and get it from our c s A.
What's wrong with that? Well, I don't know. Can't you
say parquake? Can you right? You must be a social

(01:47):
justice warrior you buy local butter? Do you like that?
What's the stuff? The Irish butter in the grocery store?
That's my brand? Uh? Carry Gold? Carry Gold. That's good too,
Like I've I've reached arched it, like I've literally researched
but the butter because I want to get the most
bang from my buck, and it is at the top
of basically every list. It's of like any butter of

(02:09):
any kind. It's really really good butter. Yeah, I totally agree.
I love carry Gold. I take that stuff camping. Yeah,
I carried it out in my pocket. Well, I like
that you can get a tub. It's a smaller tub,
but I do like a spreadable tub as opposed to
a stick. I haven't seen the tub. We have a
stick because we have a cute little butter dish, so

(02:29):
we have we used the sticks. So anyway back to um,
Mount St. Helen's the episode today. I was four years
old when this happened, so I mean I didn't know
what was going on, but I imagine you were like,
holy cow, this is one of the most amazing things
I've ever seen on my TV. Yeah, I was nine
and I remember it being a big deal. But it's

(02:51):
funny when I was researching this and then watching, UM,
there's a really really great thing on YouTube that I
recommend that A and He put out, You're ago it
had to be. It was called minute by Minute Colin. Uh,
the eruption of Mount St. Helen's really gripping stuff as
a any used to do. You know, they probably still
do that kind of stuff, but I don't know. Um,

(03:12):
all of the media around it, I was thinking, like man,
and I don't know if it was more regional or
if it truly was nationwide. But I remember the eruption,
but I didn't remember like the six weeks leading up
to it, which was a very big deal. Yeah, although
I think it was more of like a yeah, a
regional thing for this the lead up. And then also

(03:34):
if you were a geologist, a vulcanologists, a seismologist, anything
that had to do with volcanoes erupting or mountains, then
it would have been a big deal to you two.
And it definitely attracted them from far and wide. And
because there was so much warning, um, and it was
able to buy it. I mean, Mount St. Helens was
able to kind of draw to it like a magnet.

(03:56):
All of these amazingly well trained researchers, Um, they were
there when it went off. And it's probably the most
best documented volcano in history because of that. Yeah, I mean,
because like you said, the Mount st. Helens is basically
saying it's coming everyone. Would you like to document this? Yeah,
I'm telling you again, it's coming, and I'll show you

(04:18):
in lots of different scary ways that it's coming. And
people left, people stayed, people came there, people like tourists
came to see this thing. So let's get into it. Okay,
so just a real quick refresher, we've done um volcanoes,
and I think we've done super volcanoes too, because that

(04:39):
sounds like us. Yeah, was volcanoes, seventeen super volcanoes. Okay.
So we talked a lot about how volcanoes work in
those episodes, So if you want to know a lot
more in depth, go check those out. But just as
a refresher for the specific kind of volcano that Mount St.
Helens is. It's a strato volcano, and it's created when

(05:01):
one younger plate is subducted under an older plate, and
as the younger plate goes down into the bowels of
the Earth, all of the rocket carries with it gets
heated up. The same with water too, and that stuff
travels upward because it's less dense than the surrounding mantle
down below, and as it gets closer and close to
the crust, it wants to pop out of there, but

(05:23):
it can't necessarily, sometimes it can, and when it can,
it just spews out all sorts of molten lava and
that builds the volcano in a kind of a cone shape,
which is what Mount Saint Helen's was up until May. Yeah. Um,
it's a part of the cascade arc arranged there in
the Pacific Northwest, and all of this happened, and you know,

(05:45):
geologically speaking, pretty quickly. It happened over the course of
about forty years in the case of Mountain St. Helens,
which is pretty speedy. And uh, Ed helped us out
with this. We did a great job on this article. Um.
And Ed points out that you know in the Northwest,
that's why you see so many you know, uh sort
of coney mountains like that is because of this cascade

(06:07):
arc and how these mountains were formed, you know, not
too long ago, right, Yeah, forty thousand years ago, maybe
less St Helens And I think the whole arc is
less than a hundred right, um, so the whole thing
that's driving Mount St. Helens. And apparently also there's some other, um,
I guess volcanic mountains in the area, like Atoms. I

(06:29):
think Mount Adams is one as well. But there's a
there's a magma chamber somewhere under there, I think, um
possibly miles and miles below the surface. But under normal circumstances,
like I said, when a Stratto volcanoes formed, the the
lava just kind of is able to find cracks in
the crust and like it's it's released through there and
it builds the mountain up slowly and slowly. But if

(06:51):
there's not a crack in the crust, as in the
case where Mount st Helens is um, that magma starts
to back up. It hits the crust and it starts
to back up below and all of a sudden you
have a lot of stuff going on. That um makes
things go kaboom when the right set of circumstances happens. Yeah,
this is this is pretty notable. This magma chamber is uh,

(07:15):
well I is in was quite large and like you said,
it's it's looking for a place to go. But if
it doesn't have a place to go, what will happen?
And as you'll see, this is what happened in the
case of Mount st Helens is it starts bulging, and
like the mountain, if you're a geologist, it's super exciting
to see this happen. Um, even though it's very scary
and dangerous. But when a geologist sees an actual mountains

(07:37):
start to bulge out in a direction and we're talking
you know, hundreds of feet of bulge over the course
of a pretty short period of time. Then it's pretty like, Uh,
it's it's a pretty notable thing. And that's exactly what
was happening in the case of the magma chamber there
in UH in Washington. Yeah, like this pressure is building
up so much it's causing a boil on the mountain.

(07:59):
The mountain grows a goiter basically, and that's just full
of pressure and magma just waiting to go off. It
doesn't always go off. And in fact Mount St. Helen's
had two bulges also called crypto domes, which is pretty
awesome UM, from previous volcanic eruptions. One was called Goat
Rocks Bulge UM, and then the other one was called

(08:20):
the Sugar Bowl bulge, and they just never like the
magma found its way out other ways, but the bulge
was left. This is a new bulge, and like you said,
it was growing I think about six ft a day.
Every day it kept growing another six ft, which is
really fast for a mountain to grow. Uh. And that
was one of the big signs initially that that something

(08:43):
was going on. And and one more thing before we
started to get into um Mount St. Helens itself, Chuck,
I think we need to say like Mount St. Helens
was big. It was a big eruption, but it was
not the biggest eruption Mountain St. Helens has ever had.
Apparently the biggest eruption it's ever came just about four
thousand years ago, which is within um traditional like folk

(09:05):
tale memory. Yeah, I mean it had been an active
volcano for forty thousand years, but the big one before
nineteen eighty was. Yeah, like you said, four, I was
trying to look at a specific year, but let's just
say four thousand years ago, because once you get back
that far, you know who cares? Who cares? But it became,

(09:26):
like you said, part of folklore. The indigenous people there,
especially the pulla Up people, called the mountain LeWitt l
O O w I T and there was a Lout's
brewing company, so shout them out. This is one of
those things where, uh, I thought, I wonder why, because
there's been such a push to change names of things

(09:48):
over the past like a decade or so, this is
one that was. It seems so like sort of egregious
that we should call it LeWitt and not Mount st.
Helens that I'm pretty curious. I'm sure there's been pushes
over the years to get it changed, but the Europeans,
of course named it Mountain St. Helen's in after Captain

(10:09):
George Vancouver. If that name rings a bell, it should
gave the name of it because of a diplomat name,
Alan fits Herbert didn't call it fits Herbert peak or
anything like that because his noble title was Baron St.
Helen's God. But here's the rub is that Allan fitz
Herbert never even saw Mountain St. Helen's the mountain named

(10:33):
after him, So like, I don't know, maybe maybe let's
call this one LeWitt. Yeah, I think that's a great
idea actually, And the reason they call it lewe It
that that was she was named after Um, a like
a famous volcanic fire tender woman, Um and low Itt
and a couple of other men who fell in love
with her and fought for her. Um became low it

(10:57):
became Mount St. Helen's or lou It if you want
to call it, at and then the other the other
men who were fighting for became mount Hood and mount Atoms.
They were smited by the creator God and turned into
mountains for fighting Um. And there's legends not just from
the pool up, but other indigenous tribes around the area
that something really big happened, and it looks like what

(11:18):
it is is a geo myth, which we've talked about before.
And I think the Great Floods episode that has been
handed down generation after generation that describes this enormous eruption
four thousand years ago pretty good stuff. Yeah, for sure.
And it was a big eruption too. There's just one
other thing. There is a layer of tefra of basically
volcanic ash and debris and stuff that is so thick

(11:42):
and so wide it goes up into British Columbia and
sixty two miles away from Mount St. Helen. It's still
twenty inches thick, almost two ft thick of ash sixty
two miles away. That's how big that four thousand year
ago eruption was. That's huge. And all this to say
that Mount Helen's uh which has an asked, by the way,

(12:02):
did you know that? Uh? Yeah, I did, you keep saying, Helen.
I just wondered. I'm I'm being short because I don't
want to take up too much time talking about Certainly
that's good. That reminds me of the guy in college
who fell on the sidewalk and his books splayed out
and then he acted like he was reading. Yeah, I

(12:22):
love that story. I forgot about him. Um, all of
us to say is that Mount St Helen's had been,
you know, active, had a long history of activity. So
it's not like anyone ever thought, well, well, that thing
is done and it's never gonna happen again. No, definitely not.
Because also in the nineteenth century there was a lot
of um eruptions too. There's a painting by a Canadian

(12:43):
artist named Paul Kane who painted in eighteen forty seven eruption.
So I mean start starting in the nineteenth century. Um,
Mount St Helen's was documented pretty pretty clearly scientifically too,
as as being an eruptive volcano, disruptive volcan you know
you can almost say, all right, shall we take a break. Yeah,

(13:04):
that's a nice prelude, I think so too. All right,
we'll be back right after this geo. Okay, So we

(13:34):
got a nice background on Mount St Helen's that had
been very active for about or on a off, active
for forty thousand years, uh, including I believe the last
sort of big one was in eighteen fifty seven. Um,
not too long after that, in nineteen o eight, about
a million acres of land became part of Columbia National Forest,

(13:54):
which was hence renamed Gifford. Uh a pin shot or
pin show. I never know how to say that the
Bronson Pinchot National Forest National forest, and that was in
nine and Mount St. Helens is inside that National Forest.
Um all this uh, this sort of a long way
of saying. It wasn't like super populated. It didn't have
wasn't surrounded by neighborhoods and suburbs and stuff like that.

(14:17):
But there was something or is still something called Spirit
Lake there um near the base of the mountain, which
is uh, they have like youth camps there. People had
cabins here and there. There were recreational activities that all
over the place. So it's not like no one was there,
but it wasn't heavily populated right well put so, Um,

(14:39):
the whole thing starts. Actually even before the whole thing started,
and I saw in nineteen seventy five the two volcanologists
published a paper UM saying that it was very likely
Mount St. Helen's was going to erupt in the twentieth
century at some point, like a big one and five
years later, in March eighty, the whole thing was kicked
off by h four point oh earthquake, which is nothing

(15:03):
to sneeze at, and it was at the mountain. Like
this earthquake took place at the mountain, and all of
a sudden, within five days there were quake storms. There
was twenty four quakes of four point oh or greater
within eight hours. When a volcano starts doing that and
you're detecting it, you you, that's when the geologists come

(15:23):
running from far and wide. Yeah, so they you know,
the word gets out, and they did come running from
foreig and wide and they you know, set up camp
there at various places. Other just sort of um, as
I learned from watching this uh any special that um
there are like volcano chasers even that um, they hear
about this stuff. They're fascinated by it. I guess it's

(15:46):
just sort of amateur geo enthusiasts. And people started kind
of coming in there because they got wind that something
may be brewing at Mount St. Helen's including and this
is you know, they're all kinds of people we could
feature story wise, but one gentleman we are going to feature.
His name was David Johnston UH, and he was a
volcanologist at the U s g S, the United States

(16:08):
Geographical Survey, and he was one of the UM. There
were some great interviews with him in this A and
E special. He was very young guy, UM, super excited
to be there, and he was one of the ones
kind of sounding the alarm along with his partner and
this guy named Don Swanson about hey, like, you know,
the s is getting real here everybody, and it looks

(16:29):
like things like people need to start leaving. Yeah, like
the thing is is there are the people who did
live on the mountain were not the kind of folk
who listened to like, you know, the governmentcil neton college
boys or the government to be told like leave your home.
And then also there was um those youth groups that
were like you're going to ruin our week at Spirit Lake. UM.

(16:52):
There was also Weyerhauser the first base exactly it's like
a roller rink over there. UM. And then there was
Weyerhauser who had a contract to be able to log
on the on the mountain. They definitely didn't want to
have to shut down operations. So there's a lot of pressure,
a surprising amount of pressure, you know, more than you
would think to keep them outain open, and David Johnston

(17:15):
and Don Swanson and some of the other colleagues were like,
you really can't do this, and they managed to convince
the governor of Washington that it was the right move.
And then later on, as we'll see, there was even
more pressure to reopen because things didn't go as fast
as everyone thought, and they managed to push that back
as well, and as a result, David Johnston is frequently

(17:36):
credited for saving thousands of lives potentially, which is pretty cool.
I mean, and everything I've seen about and he was
a genuinely great person and also like a really great
pioneer in volcanology too. Yeah. Absolutely, um yeah. They did
eventually set up what they called a red zone, and
a lot of people did evacuate. Uh, there were some

(17:57):
notable people who didn't. Um. Certainly, we need to mention
Harry Truman. Um obviously not the president, but he was
this old kajer who ran the lodge there and he
became a folk hero because he famously thumbed his nose
and stayed and said, you know, I'm I'm a part
of this place. It's a part of me. If the

(18:17):
mountain goes, I'm gonna go with it. Art Carney played
him in the movie version. He was He got a
lot of media attention along with his sixteen cats. Um,
which is the only part of the story. Like, hey man,
I'm I'm all for people evacuating and keep people safe,
but I'm also like some old old mountain man wants

(18:40):
to stay up there and go go down with a volcano.
Like that's his right, but send the cats away. Don't
say like I'm gonna go down and kill these sixteen
cats at the same time. Yeah, it's kind of like
being buried in like you know, medieval times and having
your live horse buried with you. Yeah. I just I
don't know. Man. Once I heard about the cats, because
I was all into the sky, right, and then I

(19:01):
heard about the cat I was like, oh, dude, you
should have at least set the cats away. Yeah, no way,
not not a lodge cajure. So um, Harry Truman will
come back in. This is Harry Ard Truman, by the way,
everybody said his middle initial to differentiate him. He'll come

(19:21):
back in later. But so this mark the last thing
that we happened on the mountain. March in eight hours,
there's twenty four four point or greater magnitude earthquakes, and
that brought everybody running. Um. This whole thing was so
perfectly planned that on the day of the eruption there
was the mineral and gem show in Yakima, like I think,

(19:44):
less than a hundred miles away from Mount St. Helen's,
So anybody who has any had anything to do with
geology just happened to be in the area or was
purposefully in the area. And then on March that's just
getting more and more and more. There was an actual eruption, right, yeah,
So this was I mean, compared to what eventually ended

(20:05):
up happening, you could call this sort of many eruption.
Even though it sent it made a big boom. Apparently
it was a pretty cloudy day so it wasn't super visible,
but the ash column went up sixty feet into the air,
it's nothing to sneeze, and a new crater formed at
the summit, which grew to about six hundred feet wide,

(20:26):
so it was a major thing. There was another one
on again throwing ash into the air, and this is
like basically from that point through the big one in
mid May, it was just constant uh warning, constant upheaval, mudslides, avalanches,
craters growing, and like the mountain is saying like it's

(20:50):
gonna happen people. This is not a false alarm until
things calmed down, and that's what you were talking about earlier,
Like things kind of settled down on what was that
like May around around may to where the people got
Auntie that were evacuated and said, hey, listen, we want
to go back and check on our stuff. And the

(21:11):
governor eventually was like, all right, I think it, you
know at the time, and I think Washington still is
a little bit of one of those like uh, not
quite live free or die, but you know, like all right, listen,
these people pay taxes, they want to go back to
their homes, sign a waiver that you're not gonna sue us,
and let him go back there. And that's what they did.
They did. There's footage of them signing um waivers on

(21:34):
the hood of a car with some obvious state lawyer
in a three piece suit of canning people a pen
being like signed here. It's really hilarious, but um they did.
They started some people started to trickle in um and
that's actually why there were you know, I think, and
we ended up with fifty seven casualties. Seven people died,

(21:55):
and that was one reason why it was actually that high.
Could have could have been less, but bowl were allowed
to trickle back in. They still kept like a perimeter,
but I think it was kind of porous. If you
wanted to get through, you could get through. And there
are stories in that minute by minute episode of People.
There's this one backpacker who is probably hilarious at parties

(22:17):
because he makes like a funny a funny voice for
the police when the police is talking, when he's recreating
a conversation. Um, he's he's stuck through with friends. There
are a lot of people on the mountain that otherwise
might not have been had they kept it closed. But
they did open it up a little bit, and it
was because nothing had happened for a little while, and
then about three days later everything happened. You said, you

(22:39):
said S was getting real. This is when the S
hit the fan. Yeah, well, I mean just prior to this,
I guess let's let's back up one half second and
let you know about what happened when David Johnson and
Don Swanson, they had moved from their initial base at
cold Water one, which was about I think eight or
nine miles away. Uh, took their second station, which was

(23:02):
called cold Water two, which is about five to six
miles from the mountain. UM and notably it was on
the northeast side of the mountain, which turned out to
be the wrong spot to be UM. But you know,
these guys knew what was going on. Uh. They know
it's a dangerous job. And apparently they were swapping UM
taking shifts. And Don Swanson got the call from Johnston

(23:24):
and he said, hey, listen, I've got tonight and tomorrow
if you come and relieve me the next day. And
then on May eighteenth, nineteen eighty is when Johnston was
there when everything went boom. Yeah, and I think there
have been other colleagues and grad students and everything around
cold Water too, and Johnston sent him away. He's like,
this is outside the red zone, it's still potentially dangerous.

(23:45):
There's no reason for more than just one of us
to be here at a time, So you guys go.
So at eight thirty two am on May eighteenth night,
Mount St. Helen's like blew up. And there's like a
typical idea that people have of a volcano going off,
and most of the time it's shooting like a huge

(24:05):
thing at ash and magma straight into the air from
its top. But that is not what happened with Mount
st Helens. Mount st Helens was a very specific and
unusual type of eruption because it didn't go out of
the top. It came out of the side, and it
came out in what was known as a lateral blast eruption. Yeah,

(24:26):
so you know, like we said earlier, that pressure is
building up uh a lot under the surface. There's a
lot of moisture down there. Some of it was um,
like you mentioned, from that initial uh plate subduction. That's
called magmatic water. Some of it is just regular groundwater
from from rain and snow and everything. Because it is
the mountains, that's called meteoric water. And all of that

(24:48):
stuff is just heating up. It's got pressure from below
because it's heating, It's got pressure from above because all
of that weight of the rock is just pushing it down,
and all of this magma is just like boiling under there.
But and I don't know we talked about this before.
I guess it was in one of the volcano episodes.
But it's it's not allowed to turn to steam because

(25:08):
there's no room for it. Like steam is expansive and
it can't expand. So it's just this superheated beyond the
boiling point level of liquid that's just distributed all throughout
the upper half and notably sort of the north side
of this mountain. Yeah, and that that created that bulge
that kept growing by about six ft a day. UM.

(25:31):
That was the bultree. It is because like it's as
violent as it as you can imagine that a bulge,
and it's something that can make a bulge on the
side of the mountain would be. And so under under
other circumstances a plenty in eruption where where volcano explodes
out of the top, like you typically think of that
pressure that magma is going to basically force the top

(25:54):
of the mountain open and that's how it's going to explode.
This is not what how been with Mount St Helen's
that kind of UM. I guess the hump was on
one side. It was on the north flank, wasn't it.
So it was on the north flank, And the thing
that kicked off Mount St Helen's eruption wasn't the volcano.
It was actually an earthquake in the volcano, and that

(26:17):
that that earthquake caused the largest landslide and recorded history
on Earth. More than half of a square mile of
Mount St. Helen's suddenly vanished away. It just suddenly dropped
off the side, the north side of the mountain. Yeah,
and it's um like, you should really go check out
the footage of this stuff. It's some of the most

(26:39):
amazing like natural geologic disaster footage I've ever seen, just
to see this mountain and then that you know, especially
in the Anything to see people interviewed, uh describing like
seeing this with their eyeballs that was it was just
like it was incomprehensible what they were witnessing, like a
mountain that large and and part of it just going

(27:00):
away immediately again. And one of the reasons they were
able to witness it, and we have such great documentations
because at eight thirty two am, a pair of geologists,
husband and wife geologists, happened to be flying in a
plane because they had hired a plane to go look
at Mount St. Helen's because they'd heard that, you know,
it was there's some stuff going on, and they happened

(27:20):
to make one more pass right as the mountain that
earthquake dropped the side of the mountain. They were like
right above it in a plane. As a matter of fact,
you know, what's where's your quote? Should we read that? Yeah,
this is Dorothy Dorothy Stoffel Uh in twenty nineteen. She said,
the whole north half of the mountain that we were
flying just five feet above, began churning, and a mile

(27:41):
long fracture shot across the mountain faster than our minds
could absorb. The north half of the mountain just became
like fluid and slid away. Amazing. I saw somebody else
describe as like a zipper opening along the mountain. Yeah.
And and you know there there were amateur photographers around
for some of the stuff. Um, some of these hikers

(28:01):
like that guy you mentioned that was telling the story
and finding voices, UM and volcano chasers like they got
some some like some One guy got like twenty two
pictures in a row and this is when it eventually blew.
The other guy got like six or eight pictures. Uh.
There was a family uh camping with their two young
daughters and that guy they were you know on the

(28:24):
north side, Um, you know, well below it but uh,
you know, within the range. And he was like, you know,
speaking to how it didn't blow from the top, he said,
it looked like somebody shot a shotgun out of the
side of this mountain pointed at us. So ash ash
was raining down, but it was raining like at people
and less down from the sky right exactly. It wasn't

(28:46):
going up and then coming back down. It was coming
straight at you if you were anywhere north of the mountain. Yea.
And the reason why the north of the mountain was
so dangerous because that's where that hump had been. That's
also where the earthquake moved a good portion of the mountain,
which meant that all that pressure that was keeping that pressurized,
superheated water from boiling under the mountain was suddenly exposed.

(29:09):
It was that pressure was gone, and so all of
that incredibly hot water flash heated into steam. And when
that happens, that expands. Like you said, the reason that
one of the reasons steam can't exist in that situation
is because it's too expansive. When it does have the
chance to expand, uh, it does so with incredible force.

(29:33):
And that's what happened. That's why Mount Saint Helen's blew
out the side rather than the top because there had
been a weakening and the pressure that allowed all that
to just blow out and blow out it did. Yeah,
I mean it was um. If you look at it,
it looks almost like a controlled demolition blast or something. Um.
It definitely doesn't look like any kind of volcano blast

(29:55):
that you might think of in your head. Um. It
happened kind of all at once, and it was twenty
four megaton blast, which I know everyone always tries to
compare it to like Hiroshima. It was six hundred times
as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Good lord, But
I mean that's what it would take to move point

(30:16):
six square or cubic miles of mountain all of a
sudden too, you know, And that that blast chuck that
that twenty four megaton blast. It was described as like
a fast moving cloud of heat and stones moving at
at some points pretty close to the mountain three hundred
miles an hour, heated to like six hundred and sixty

(30:39):
degrees fahrenheit. I think that's like three degrees celsius, just
blowing northward away from the mountain and everything within eight
miles of that of the Mountain was in that blast zone,
and if you recall correctly, David Johnston's um cold Water
to camp was within about five miles. Yeah, he obviously

(31:04):
didn't make it. Uh, they found I think they found
pieces of his trailer like a decade later. H he
had time to send out one signal which was over
his radio Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it. The only person
to pick that up was a Ham radio operator nearby,
and they renamed that Arie Johnston Ridge in his honor. Um. Obviously,

(31:27):
Harry Truman perished along with those sixteen cats, and he
was close enough, uh to where I saw that. They
said that he and everything around him was basically instantly vaporized,
Like he wouldn't have felt anything. It would have happened
his death and vaporization would have happened in like less
than a second. Yeah, I have the impression the same

(31:49):
thing happened to David Johnston. And also that rad that
Ham radio operator who was volunteering to kind of document it.
He documented David Johnston. Um get covered up, he said,
Um the he said, gentleman, the camper in the car
that's sitting over to the south of me. He was
talking about David Johnston is covered is going to hit

(32:10):
me too. And that was Jerry Martin, that Ham radio operator,
and that was his last transmission. He was vaporized as well.
Essentially everything everything north of the mountain within eight miles
was just destroyed, just destroyed, like entire hundred foot trees
that were like ten twelve feet in diameter, just completely

(32:32):
flattened and also denuded of any bark on the way
as well. UM. And this was just a blast that UM.
The landslide that was created from that, the the earthquake
that initially triggered the eruption UM that had in some
incredible effects as well. Yeah, because what you've got, you know,
beyond this avalanche happening, is you've got all of a sudden,

(32:54):
all this heat happens in a place where there's a
lot of snow, so that snow melts, that glacier ice melts,
and you have flooding, and you have mud slides, and
you have a word that I had never even heard
of before Ed included it in here, which was lahar,
which sounds like just a mud slide on steroids, like

(33:14):
a mudside carrying ammunition with it. And this is just
raining down everywhere and and like causing a path of
destruction that hasn't been seen in like modern times in
this country. Yeah, it was like it had so much
power chuck that that that slide did that one part
of it was carrying chunks of rock as big as

(33:35):
five hundred and fifty eight feet or seven hundred and
seventy across. That's as big as a fifty story building.
It was moving rocks that size just fast as you
can imagine, down the mountain into the valleys. And I
saw it described as if you were watching it from
a ridge, as some people were, like far away, you
would see the cloud or the debris starting to come

(33:59):
at you. It would disappear into a valley, and then
all of a sudden it would come up over the
ridge and keep keep going. It would. It was just
filling valleys with rocks and debris. It's just it's it's
unimaginable trying to grasp what happened. And it's even crazier
that some people are actually they're watching this happen crazy.

(34:20):
It is crazy. You want to take a break, Yeah,
we'll take a break and talk a little bit more
about the after effects right after this. Okay, we're back,

(34:54):
and as Chuck promised everyone, it's after effect time. Well,
we talked a little bit about it. Um. Obviously, Spirit Lake,
which we mentioned at the beginning, which was at the
base of the mountain UM, has a very strange effects
on bodies of water. It Uh, it did two things.
It made the lake larger, but it also made it shallower,

(35:14):
because it just flooded all this water down there and
raised it such that the outlet was basically dammed up,
and so the lake got a whole lot bigger, but
it reduced its depth by about eight feet. Um. I
think five years later they built a spillway tunnel to
control the depth of the lake. Um. Two hundred homes
and cabins and about two hundred miles of road and

(35:37):
railways were completely obliterated. Yeah. I also saw that lake
was now two hundred feet higher in elevation than it
had been before, as if like there was so much debris.
It like raised the lake two hundred feet even though
it also made it shallower. It's nuts, And I think
it lowered the ultimate height of Mount Saint Helen's right. Yeah, Um,

(35:58):
I can't remember. I think by like six meters or
something like that. Some ridiculous amount of height just blown off.
And that was another thing too, like the after effects
of it um if you look at Mount St. Helen's
today or especially like right afterward, UM, it was turned
into like an amphitheater, Like the north side was blown
out and the other sides were kind of curved around

(36:21):
and what was neat is one of the huge after
effects of Mount St. Helen's. One of the more positive
ones is I saw it described as like a crash
course um for vulcanologists and seismologists and everybody who are
now just had this amazing natural laboratory to study in.
And that the eruption, because it was the lateral blast,
opened up like basically a cross section of the mountain

(36:44):
that they could study. Now it's it's past history from
the inside out, which I thought was pretty neat. And
a young Trey Anastasia said, one day I shall play
at the base of that amphitheater and bore people with noodling.
They they there, No, I don't think so. I don't
think there's anything there. How was this kidding? Oh wow,

(37:04):
that was just completely made. I never will miss a
chance to take a ticket fish with you. Uh so,
ash is raining down and out. Uh, it literally darkened
the skies. Um. When this ash, if you were close
enough to it, it would literally burn you alive. Um.
If you're far away, it can just create a lot

(37:25):
of problems everything from uh, you know, just equipment not working,
electrical outages and blackouts and brown outs. Visibility is obviously terrible. Um.
As far as crops go, certain crops were wiped out
by this ash and the toxic gases. Some of them
did a little bit better because they just got a
little bit of the ash and it um ash will

(37:47):
help promote rainfall and hold moisture in the ground better.
So apparently wheat crops and apple crops fared pretty well. Yeah,
that was surprising. Yeah. I also saw and there was
a lot of devastation. Any any big game animal in
the blast zone. Was I said, big game animal by
the way, was it was in the blast zone? Was

(38:08):
was killed without question, But they were They were very surprised.
Biologists who went in to investigate shortly afterward found they
were like entire communities and ecosystems of smaller animals and
plants and microbes. Fun. Guy that had survived just fine.
And we're among the first to recallonize and we're part
of the reason why um Mount St. Helen's ecosystem started

(38:31):
to rebound so quickly. I mean, that's what will happen,
right if if if the Earth ever just burns up
into a fiery ball, that'll just become a big mushroom field,
right probably, and then the animals that lived underground will
come above ground and say it's our time, baby, I
look forward to for some um what else happened? Oh?

(38:52):
I saw that the ash cloud that that um that
blew finally out of the top. We should say that
the lateral blast was followed by a plenty in blast
and that shot, like you know, that was the money
volcano shot that everybody was looking for. A plume of
ash and smoke rose eighty thousand feet into the air,

(39:12):
and it was moving so fast that it circled the
globe in fifteen days, came back to square one in
fifteen days. And of course that was like affecting air traffic.
Do you remember the icelandic Uh volcano that affected air
traffic in Europe for like weeks. Weren't you stranded by
that or something? Okay? Okay? Um it like they knew

(39:34):
what to do in part because of how Mount St.
Helen's affected air travel. At the time, they were like,
this is brand new to us, um, but it helped
lay the groundwork for understanding what to look for how
to deal with that kind of stuff later on. Yeah,
the um. The other thing I wanted to point out
to about Spirit Lake was if you look at footage
of the lake and now these kind of rivers that

(39:57):
were just happening, and it literally like re out it
you know, the Columbia River and the Cowlitz River in sections, um,
but it looks like it looks like a logging operation
is happening, um, and like you could almost and may
have been able. Well obviously it has been too dangerous,
but it looks like you could have walked over these logs.
They were so like packed and these were just trees

(40:20):
you know, an hour before. Yeah, if you could do
that lumberjack log rolling thing, you could have probably made
it across the lake. But there in that minute by
minute episode, there was a pair of like high school
sweethearts who have been camping and they had a harrowing
experience because they they both got thrown into Spirit Lake,

(40:40):
and um, the boyfriend was able to rescue the girlfriend.
Is like the logs were starting to close in on him.
He pulled her out from the lake and they were
hanging onto logs when they finally made it out and
were rescued. That happened like that happened to somebody. They
were in their car. Oh is that how? And that's
how they got in the lake. They were in their car. Yeah,
they said it just picked him up and all that

(41:02):
they were driving and then they were floating and they
said that there you know there she said, like my
instinct was to get out of the car, but there
was like nowhere to go, right yeah, because there were
trees everywhere floating around beside him, right yeah. And this
is you know, these are just sort of That's what
was so cool about the special is it really brought
in the human element of these people that were around there.

(41:22):
Um and they you know, they all survived because they
were being interviewed obviously UM Dorothy Stoffel, who was the
the geologist that was flying with UM. I guess it
was her husband, Keith. Was that her brother her her
husband Keith? Okay, Um they survived that plane flight, like
they got out of there. There were stories of people

(41:43):
that literally it was like from a movie. Drove, you know,
a hundred and ten miles an hour, like out running
this ash debris slide coming at right. Yeah, and some
people didn't make it. So there was one guy who
was chronicled in that that was driving as fast as
you can in the blasts just caught up with him

(42:04):
and buried him um in the in the ash um
and he probably died pretty much instantly. But like again,
that happened to people. There's very famous footage of a
house just flowing down like a newly engorged mud slide
e river moving so fast that you probably could have
towed water skiers from the house. Essentially it was moving

(42:26):
that fast just down the river. So I mean again,
it was one of the most documented um volcanic eruptions
of all times. So there's really amazing footage on there
or just on the internet, is what I mean. Um,
But that wasn't the last time that that Mount St.
Helen's has erupted. I think it erupted a few times

(42:46):
between nineteen eighty and maybe I think, yeah, and then
the biggest one recently was between two thousand four and
two thousand eight. Yeah, it started sort of getting a
little more active again. Uh this time though, you know,
one of the things that um to the benefit of
the surrounding area when a volcano blows like that is

(43:07):
that pressure is released and it's gonna take a long
time to build back up to that level again kind
of depending on what how it reforms on top of it.
But this time apparently there are, uh, there are more
ways for this pressure to be released. So I think
it's just sort of the pressure is being released a
little more gradually since the two thousand foursion too. But

(43:30):
there they do say that like, oh no, like it
will happen again, like things are uh, there is a
new lava dome growing and the pressure is going to
build up, and it could be in a thousand years
or it could be in ten years. Yeah, we just
don't know now, but they are studying it. Like there
there's a lot of active research and study going on

(43:52):
at Mount Saint Helen's now. Yeah, I believe, you know,
the eruption was such a big deal that they've they've
opened the U s g S opened a research station
nearby UM and also that that two thousand four activity
basically ran from two thousand four to two eight. Like
you said, they've been studying the mountain closely. So there's
amazing time laps footage of those four years, and it's

(44:15):
astounding how fast and how big Mount St. Helen's just
grows from that eruption activity. It's called time laps Images
of Mount St Helen's um dome growth. It's on YouTube, UM,
and I recommend checking that out as well. Yeah, I
would just be careful when you google dome growth or

(44:37):
bulge growth. Boy. So, man, we are so juvenile sometimes,
aren't we? And by we I mean me too. Um.
But like we said, Mount St Helens bounced back, Spirit
Lake open back up and the cold Water two station
has been renamed after David Johnston and there's an amazing
memorial too. I saw on some trip Advisor posts that

(44:58):
somebody so I was like, the one of the best, um,
like not welcome center, but you know, information centers that
the person's ever been to. So I would like to
go there. Some cookies are en real? All right? You
got anything else? I got nothing else? All right, We'll
go forth and research um Mount St Helen's with an

(45:19):
s UM. And you can start doing that by watching
Dante's Peak. Since I said Dante's peak, it's time for
listener mail. This is following up on an email that
you particularly liked from our speectacular. Okay, hey, guys, thoroughly
enjoying the most recent spectacular. The accents are comedy genius.
Uh Meagle, do you want to pop in and say Hi, Hello, perfect?

(45:45):
I'm gonna bring Megle back every now and then. By
the way, I just want to prepare you in the audience.
I wanted to address a couple of eighteen hundreds diction
issues that call some puzzlement. Uh. When you got talked
about toilet it's basically what Josh said. I've always thought
of it as a refreshing as freshening up in the bathroom,
washing your face and hands when first waking up, or
going to bed. A double check with Marion Webster, though,

(46:06):
and it's more generally dressing and grooming. That makes sense. Yeah. Sure.
On the other hand, the strangers in the beverage from
the toll House is a lot more puzzling. I had
no idea what it meant, And although Josh's guests that
beverage meant the pub was clever, it doesn't really make
sense just as a reminder of the sentence is talking
about some men drinking tea in an end and pausing

(46:29):
to quote discover the sex and dates of arrival of
the strangers, which floated in some numbers in the beverage
end quote. I think I found the answer, though, guys,
in a Dictionary of Scottish dialect, we love this stuff
by them, this is amazing. Tea leaves floating on the
surface of your drink are considered omens that you will
meet someone new, So these tea leaves are called strangers.

(46:52):
If you pick up a stranger and bite it, the
toughness will tell you whether the new acquaintance will be
male or female. Amazing. I'm gonna guess there's also a
way to predict the date you meet this person, although
I didn't see reference to that. So that's what the
characters are doing, guys, using tea leaves to predict the future.
By the way, other omens can also be strangers, like
unburned candlewicks or sit on greats. I've loved the show

(47:14):
for years, look forward to anymore. That is a great email.
Nat Jacob's fantastic uh sleuthing and we are super grateful.
Top to bottom start to finish. Wonderful email. Also just
put so nicely to not like you big dummies. Yeah,
because I got it pretty wrong. It was a terrible guess,

(47:35):
but I mean that was really hard. Like you was obscure,
you know very much? Anyway, I love knowing that now.
That was one of my favorite emails. So thanks a lot, Nat.
And if you want to be like Nat and get
in touch with us in the best way possible, you
can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart
radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production

(47:58):
of I Heart Radio from our podcasts My heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H m hm