OT - Mt. St. Helen's erupts on this date in 1980
How many remember Mt. St. Helen's eruption on this date in 1980. I was a junior in High School and remember it well. All we had back then was the network nightly news. Here's a story of a Boeing employee who was northeast of the volcano when it erupted. A cool picture he took as well https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2019/07/26/the-story-behind-that-photo-of-the-pinto-in-front-of-the-mt-st-helens-eruption?fbclid=IwAR1VHfPl-ZUuos6YEvHe42ELDeI9ns6HFtk5YetzogVUMth5rRmR5xMldKw
That volcano didn't erupt so much as it exploded.
they knew it was gonna blow ... just not how big and which way the flow was going to go. Evacuations were underway when it went off.
We had an inch of volcanic ash on the ground, didn't see the sun for two days, and missed nearly a month of school. Pretty unforgettable part of my childhood.
I thought it happened again for a second until I read the whole title
57 people died. Crazy the guy that took that famous photo lived. He was lucky as hell and at the time, had no idea his small decisions of when and where to stop and take photos, etc saved his life.
You’ll also want to know about this poor fellow. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Landsburg
he knew he wouldn’t make it so he proceed his equipment with his body to preserve the photographs he took of the eruption.
Fire on the Mountain!
Long distance runner what you standing there for?
Get up get up and get out of that Ford.
It's still amazing to see the damage that volcanic explosion caused. You think - 'oh a volcano in the US, no big deal. The US is a great country with excellent infrastructure, no way it caused much damage'...
Mother Nature can be a bitch...
I was too young to remember it occurring at the time, but my childhood was filled with predictions that half of California was going to fall into the Pacific, punctuated by the 1989 earthquake that caused the collapse of a portion of the Bay Bridge and Cypress Viaduct in Oakland.
My childhood was filled with cops telling us that there were people everywhere waiting to give me free drugs and that I should "just say no."
Lying ass cops. I never got a free trial run of drugs. Where were all these free drugs and why could I never find them?
Maybe you grew up in a place that didn't have that issue? Soon after I graduated high school, a local pharmacist decided that he could make a few bucks by selling oxy on the cheap. He got caught, prosecuted, and shipped off. But not before he built up a sizeable business with a rather significant list of clients. After he left, there was a supply vacuum that regional heroin dealers were all too happy to expand into. The area got absolutely crushed.
So while it wasn't the child-molester-driving-an-unmarked-van-trying-to-get-you-hooked-on-drugs image that the DARE program gets lambasted for, perhaps there was some benefit or underlying wisdom in the message itself.
Ah, DARE. Or as it was known in our household, Drugs Are Really Egregious.
I don't know anyone else's experience but the winning essays in MY experience were written by kids who knew how to play the system.
Oooo....kay? I don't really have an opinion on the program per se. And call me old fashioned, but I don't have a problem with telling grade school kids to stay away from drugs.
I don't have a problem with it either.
But it seems to me DARE is ineffective—again, others will have their own experience—because it makes the common mistake about education, that simply saying something is the same thing as learning it.
It's like the difference between Little League coaches who yell to keep your eye on the ball without helping kids learn HOW to keep their eye on the ball.
Makes sense. And teaching methodologies back then were very different than they are today. A lot of, just put the info out there and hope it sticks. Of course this isnt tailored to a child's learning styles, not to mention the fact that there are a host of other factors relevant to why a child might or might not one day choose to use drugs.
I have been offered a lot of drugs for free, but they've almost entirely been drugs that aren't particularly dangerous: weed, shrooms, LSD. I have been offered meth before, but I declined because that seemed like a bad idea.
Just reach out to my friend [email protected]. He will hook you up.
Only this blog could take an OT post about a 40+ year old volcanic event and politicize it.
Fucking classic; well done all!!!
Also. Mt. St. Helens is a medium-large volcano, not the biggest in the region; it's out in the middle of nowhere; and it's surrounded by terrain in such a way that its mudflows are confined to a relatively small and very lightly-populated area.
Mt. Rainier is several thousand feet taller, much larger by volume, has a massively larger icepack, is far more prominent, and is located near the edge of its range. When, not if, it erupts, the size of the eruption will determine the damage, but a St. Helens-sized eruption could destroy literally every settlement between Tacoma and Seattle with mudflows. Those mudflows would reach Puget Sound and Lake Washington and set off tsunamis that threaten everything on the shores of those bodies of water, which includes the downtowns of both Seattle and Tacoma.
The port of Tacoma would be gone, and SeaTac airport is on higher ground and could survive, depending on the mudflow size. If not, I-5 between the two cities would be gone, and probably the I-90 bridge over Lake Washington, as well as the southern section of I-405. In other words, the ability to get relief aid into survivors by air, ground, or sea, all would be severely hampered.
Mt. Rainier is by far this country's most horrendous natural disaster waiting to happen. You'd hope for some advance warning, as with St. Helens, but evacuation routes out of the area are few and would be traffic-jammed beyond all recognition. Could happen in 1, 10, 50, 100, or 500 years, but it will happen.
This guy disasters.
Does this guy know how to party, or what?
should we worry about the Cascadia subduction zone or New Madrid? (not sarcasm)
Which one do you live closer to?
I can see Vancouver Island from my house so Cascadia it is.
Cascadia. New Madrid would be unlikely to cause a tsunami. Well, worry about New Madrid, too, if you live near it.
There was a neat article a few years ago that I can't find right now, but it was about how scientists pinpointed the exact date of a massive Cascadia earthquake in the year 1700, using Japanese tsunami records, native lore, and ancient petrified trees and their tree rings. The article also pointed out what might happen if another 9.0 earthquake hit the area - which basically summed up to "every coastal city in Oregon and Washington would be wiped out." Oh, and it mentioned that such earthquakes hit the area on average every 250 or 270 years, or something like that, and that the one 322 years ago was the most recent.
Mt. Rainier is by far this country's most horrendous natural disaster waiting to happen.
There is a supervolcano under Yellowstone.
There's a big magma chamber under Yellowstone, but it's not a bomb waiting to go off. The people who study it aren't even sure there's enough material there for a major eruption and they figure based on past supereruptions, that if it were to happen again we'd have decades of warnings.
Mt. Rainier is definitely a bomb waiting to go off, and we'd have maybe a couple months' warning (or maybe not) and no way of knowing the actual date.
That's not what I've read, but if you have another source, I'd love to see a link. All I've read is that based on past eruptions, it would be a global disaster leading to untold numbers of deaths and suffering due to an altered climate in the short run. And decades of warning? Again, that may be overestimating the risk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypn3Fe_PLts
This is a good video on it
Much better one than the one I posted.
Yes, a supervolcanic eruption at Yellowstone would be a global-meltdown kind of disaster. The point is that it's exceedingly unlikely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZQfTg7Z9pg
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/10/12/yellowstone-supervolcano-research-finds-what-triggered-eruption/757337001/
Chances of about 1 in 730,000 in any given year, but again, the conditions that would trigger it would be known to scientists over the course of quite a few years.
"...maybe a couple months' warning..."
I can see it now - nobody would listen to the geologists because a natural disaster in the Pacific NW isn't sexy, like a hurricane wiping out NO again. About a month later, when it becomes obvious to citizens that something is underfoot, Congress will hold a vote of referendum that something will soon happen. They'll congratulate themselves on a big bipartisan win. Two weeks out, some inhabitants will begin to leave, sparking faux-anger and mocking of them for being chicken-shit. Some will begin to tell the world that God hates the Liberal Pacific NW and that global warming is a lie so nothing will ever happen.
People will start to see the volcanic eruption one week out and mass panic will ensue. Signs about the rapture will be everywhere. Congress will call for calm evacuations, while safely ensconced in a 700' deep fallout shelter.
When it's all over, FEMA will be found to be woefully unprepared because they staged all their supplies and assets within then damage zone.
"Nobody's doing anything because nobody cares and nobody's listening" is definitely one of the themes of the Cascadia earthquake article I mentioned but still can't find.
This is a few years old but shows USGS risk assessment of the highest risk US volcanoes.
If Yellowstone erupts its affecting the whole world, not just the pacific northwest.
other than that, no biggie.
did fly over mt. st. helen the next year. wild to see from the air.
And until you have lived there a little while you don't understand in your bones what Rainer could do to the region. The mountain looms over the whole area, you can't get away from it for dozens of miles to the North, West and South of it.
I've been to Mt St Helens and it's relatively small and isolated compared to Rainier.
I remember going to some fair in Puyallup and looking at Google maps in terrain mode and realizing this whole city would be gone with a sizable eruption, and you can see by the terrain it HAD already been "destroyed" at least once.
I lived in Everett for a short time some years ago. I was amazed how, on a (rare) clear day, you could see Rainier from there. It was almost as impressive as how Rainier looked on I-5 going to Tacoma.
Way exagerated.
"“The biggest [misconception] I've seen is an overestimation of hazards, such as an assumption that a Mount Rainier eruption will cause widespread destruction in Seattle,” Brian Terbush, Washington State Emergency Management Division volcano program coordinator"
https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/disaster/how-a-mount-rainier-eruption-could-impact-seattle-vs-the-south-sound/281-aed7af0a-3e7f-4eb7-bfde-07c22ceffb2d
The USGS provides info on volcanic hazards at Mount Rainier. Primary risk to communities away from the volcano is lahars flooding events along the rivers.
https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/mount-rainier/volcanic-hazards-mount-rainier
Per the USGS...
"Past lahars at Mount Rainier traveled as fast as 70-80 km per hour (45-50 mi per hour) and were as much as 150 m (490 ft) deep where confined in valleys near the volcano. They thinned, slowed, and spread out in the wide valleys and lowlands downstream."
It would clearly be terrible, but most of the damage would be closer to the volcano than Seattle.
Per Seattle Emergency Management...
https://www.seattle.gov/emergency-management/hazards/volcano-hazards-including-lahars
"Lahars from Mt. Rainier have buried the Kent Valley in the past, but there is no evidence a lahar has reached Seattle in the past 10,000 years. A Washington Department of Natural Resources analysis states that it is possible for a lahar to reach Seattle but would be extremely unlikely."
I agree with that. But there are a lot of burbs of Seattle, like Puyallup that are direct line. I'd bet 50000-150000 dead with no warning would be easy.
I think the point is that there most likely would be plenty of warning.
In the event of a landslide lahar that occurs with little volcanic activity (the rare exception with little warning,) it most likely would affect the upriver areas closer to the volcano and not the more populated areas closer to Puget Sound.
I wouldn't want to minimize the threat, but the facts don't seem to support the kind of casualties you are talking about. Damage to homes, infrastructure, etc. in the flood plains could be pretty severe in a major eruption, but hopefully the loss of life would not be.
That sounds really bad but if we deployed Dwayne The Rock Johnson in time he could find a way to stave off the worst of it.
As much as I hate the weather in the midwest, it does seem vastly preferable to every other regional weather disaster scenario. I think I'll stay put.
That feels right, but the actuary at the cocktail party will tell you differently. In the United States, on average tornados kill more people annually than earthquakes and volcanoes have killed in the entire history of the country (I'm not counting that thing in Hawaii before it was a state).
What's the regional weather disaster scenario along the southern half of the Appalachians?
Dude. You are utterly full of shit. Stop posting. This is the most corrosive kind of bullshit post because maybe 40% of it is true so it smells truthy but its not.
Ranier is a dangerous volcano, unquestionably. And the current thinking is that the primary risk from Ranier is lahars - mudflows - generated from melting ice and snow on Ranier's summit.
But lahars are a managable risk. Their effects are limited to the valleys that drain Ranier - which IIRC are home to about 100,000 people. And do NOT include the downtowns of Seattle metro. You''ll have plenty of warning of an imminent eruption, and you're not moving that many people compared to a hurricane evacuation. It won't be fun, but its orders of magnitude less complex than preparing for other natural disasters.
There is no material risk of "tsunamis" in Puget Sound, and no material risk of a "St. Helens-sized eruption" because the eruptive mode at Ranier is totally different than St. Helens. Sure, volcanos can surprise you (I took a field class with the guy who survived Galeras, so I've heard that first hand). But the crazy scenarios are extremely low risk and even for the lahar-generating eruptions, the average recurrence interval at Ranier is like 1000 years. Yada yada, this is so far away from something to write DRAMATIC CRISIS PORN POSTS about. The risk of a Casacadia megathrust is an order of magnitude greater - that one does keep people up at night.
Source: actually am a geologist.
Yeah I don't know that much about the subject but a tsunami occurring because of a mainland volcano doesn't make sense. How would that energy teleport away from shore and then come back towards it?
There are a few ways it could happen in a relatively closed basin like Puget Sound. A particularly massive lahar with a lot of potential energy; a particularly massive pyroclastic flow; or, by far the most likely, if there was a landslide / caldera collapse that displaced a lot of water. We also now know of a fourth mode from that crazy Tonga eruption earlier this year - - a big enough boom can generate a quasi meteotsunami.
But none of those apply here, because Ranier is well inland and any flows it generates will have a lot of runoff at low gradient to dissipate potential energy before they hit the Sound. It’s more like something you could see where the volcano runs right next to the water, like, say, Katmai in Alaska.
but we do know where a volcano is right on the water, tsunamis are possible: see eg the tsunami deposits in the Aegean they just published on last year which can be dated to Santorini.
I remember it well - I was 11 yrs old and in the 6th grade. That week's Science classes were a lot more fun than usual.