All this talk about volcanoes made me hungry for an old-fashioned disaster movie that were so popular during the nineties. So I decided to dig out Dante’s Peak to watch this weekend! Pierce Brosnan, Linda Hamilton, volcanic eruptions… Filmed in a beautiful silver mining town of Wallace, ID
They did have warning, ( in March, when a crater opened up. They monitored extensive seismic activity) but underestimated how large the blast zone would be.
It could have been much worse, a month later, high schools would have been out, and there would have been many more of the curious & foolhardy, killed.
@teriwtt: Rainier is very unlikely to erupt without any preliminary activity. When magma moves it causes earthquakes so there are seismic events leading up to an eruption and also changes in gas composition, changes in the tilt of the slopes, etc. So if any of these things happen, change your vacation plans.
The problem is not predicting that an eruption will occur sometime, but exactly when. A lot of the people who were killed at St. Helens had been let into the restricted area to go to their houses and collect things. No one knew the eruption would be that morning; activity had slowed down a bit. But the fact that there was an eruption wasn’t a big surprise. We’ve learned a lot about volcanic eruptions since then but we’re not much more able to predict the exact timing of an eruption than we were. The flip side is predicting an eruption that doesn’t happen. Say Rainier was giving off all the signs that it was going to blow so they evacuated the entire region; heck all of Washington State! How long could you keep people out of the area? What would that do to the economy? What if the eruption didn’t come in a week? Would you let them back in? Until geologists know enough to predict an eruption really accurately, it’s not going to be of much use.
I was post partum with a newborn and remember well being homebound so I could see the news of it. Our friends from WA brought us some ash, but alas, we apparently discarded it along the way.
It was so astounding and surprising and awewome.
All this talk about volcanoes made me hungry for an old-fashioned disaster movie that were so popular during the nineties. So I decided to dig out Dante’s Peak to watch this weekend! Pierce Brosnan, Linda Hamilton, volcanic eruptions… Filmed in a beautiful silver mining town of Wallace, ID>>>>>>
I like that movie!
@JustOneDad - Where were you? I know the Spokane/Pullman/TriCities areas were pretty hard hit by the ash. My parents lived in Richland, and my mother says it was like night had fallen. She collected some of the ash and still has it in a little bottle on her dresser.
My goodness, 35 years. I was in Seattle. I happened to be up and outside. It was a beautiful Sunday morning, and it was quiet at 8:30. I heard a loud, faraway BOOM, but I didn’t put it together despite all the coverage of the impending eruption during the previous weeks. I figured it was a factory explosion or something. It wasn’t until later that morning when I was in Sears and all the TVs were tuned to coverage that I realized what I had heard.
Exactly one week later, the following Sunday morning, I noticed a very very fine coat of dust on my car, but it felt smoother than dust. The ash cloud had travelled all the way around the world.
Light and fluffy, but very, very abrasive. The sound of the blast went to the NW but the initial ash cloud went to the East. In Portland, it took calls from concerned parents to alert us to what had happened hardly 50 miles away. We went out on the roof of the dormitory and viewed what looked like the end of the world. A week later there was a secondary eruption and weather conditions that sent ash the other way, to Portland and Western Washington, including Seattle.
If there wasn’t enough ashfall in Portland to remind you of the nuclear apocalypse, traveling through the wasteland that was now the Toutle River valley would. My old Ford had leaks in the air intake system so ash got past the filter. It got me home that year, but the dose of ash killed it.
I had just moved to Seattle and in with my boyfriend. While watching the eruption we got into a little argument that evolved into other topics, and ended up with us deciding to get married.
A few months later, while looking at houses, there was a small eruption that I could see from the kitchen window of a house we were viewing. We bought that house and saw a few ash burps before the mountain quieted down.
Lived in The Dalles, Oregon when she blew. Volcanic dust on our window sills and and cars. But the second blow was when H and I were on a date in Portland and the ash came down like snowflakes.
Sent ashes to relatives in Indiana and they were thrilled.
I rememeber dusting the closed window sills for weeks.
1st blow I heard, like a sonic boom, far away in Eugene. I had been studying abroad in Europe and had just gotten home late the night before. The 2nd blast was during the Rose Festival in Portland - the one that “rained ash” in Portland. I was working at the Rose Festival (summer job) and we closed the festival down. The ash made everything very slippery. My brother was also working, and got hit by a car (drunk driver), breaking both his legs. I won’t likely ever forget that night…nor will he! You can probably still buy all the souvenirs made with Mt. St. Helens Ash.
SJTH: Yes, you can.
https://www.madeinwashington.com/product_information.cfm?ID=1097
They sell little bottles of ash, also, but I still have mine.
Not in that group particularly, but I did see a documentary about the eruption produced not all that long afterwards. The most remarkable part was a guy looking at the layers of ash that had been deposited and then cut through by flowing water to reveal the various layers. His comment was that as geologists they would say that this depositing had occurred over thousands of years, and yet they knew that in this case it happened in 48 hours or so. He was a very honest fellow.