Don’t have any answers, but I do have another question (figured I’d throw it in here rather than starting a whole new thread) – why is Mount St Helens plural? Or was there actually a St Helens?
CurtC
October 5, 2004, 9:52pm
4
Where did they shovel all the ash to?!? You think someone shoveled 150 billion cubic feet of ash?
There’s a town in the UK, near to my hometown, called St Helens too.
…which could do with a earth-destroying eruption …
From here :
Baron St. Helens:
smootman:
Did it make a noise?
Where did they shovel all of the ash to after that?
Some people heard a noise. From this article in the Seattle Times
I’m in Yakima, and was at the time, I didn’t hear anything unusual. I was in church and couldn’t see anything through the stained glass windows, but I did leave my sunday school classroom as it became dark and someone was yelling St. Helens had blown. People went to the doors to see what was going on outside, but I don’t recall anyone saying they had heard something beforehand, just the change from day to a seeming night.
From the same article I quoted before, regarding cleanup:
Back in Yakima, City Manager Dick Zais assembled a small army. By midweek help came from the National Guard, neighborhood block watches and convoys of people and equipment sent from as far as Portland and Seattle.
It was horrible. Dump sites were created for a lot of areas, most of the people in my neighborhood took the ash to a certain area of our local landfill. There was still ash for years afterward around here. A little more on that here
The removal and disposal of ash from highways, roads, buildings, and airport runways were monumental tasks for some eastern Washington communities. State and Federal agencies estimated that over 2.4 million cubic yards of ash-equivalent to about 900,000 tons in weight-were removed from highways and airports in Washington State. Ash removal cost $2.2 million and took 10 weeks in Yakima. The need to remove ash quickly from transportation routes and civil works dictated the selection of some disposal sites. Some cities used old quarries and existing sanitary landfills; others created dumpsites wherever expedient. To minimize wind reworking of ash dumps, the surfaces of some disposal sites have been covered with topsoil and seeded with grass. About 250,000 cubic yards of ash have been stockpiled at five sites and can be retrieved easily for constructional or industrial use al some future date if economic factors are favorable.
From that last site, regarding #1:
The catastrophic eruption on May 18, 1980, was preceded by 2 months of intense activity that included more than 10,000 earthquakes, hundreds of small phreatic (steam-blast) explosions, and the outward growth of the volcano’s entire north flank by more than 80 meters. A magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck beneath the volcano at 8:32 a.m. on May 18, setting in motion the devastating eruption. Within seconds of the earthquake, the volcano’s bulging north flank slid away in the largest landslide in recorded history, triggering a destructive, lethal lateral blast of hot gas, steam, and rock debris that swept across the landscape as fast as 1,100 kilometers per hour. Temperatures within the blast reached as high as 300 degrees Celsius. Snow and ice on the volcano melted, forming torrents of water and rock debris that swept down river valleys leading from the volcano. Within minutes, a massive plume of ash thrust 19 kilometers into the sky, where the prevailing wind carried about 490 tons of ash across 57,000 square kilometers of the Western United States. – Brantley, 1994