40 years ago today!

[boatme99]

It almost slipped by me. 40 years ago Mt. St. Helen's erupted cataclymically.
I always remember as that was the day I rolled into Tucson, Az. in my 78 VW camper. I'd left Colorado about 2 weeks earlier with no clear destination in mind other than finding warmer weather. We took a slow trip through Utah, Nevada, and then down to Tucson.
I was sitting in a park checking the Sunday classifieds for a job and a place to live when the news came on the radio.
Hard to believe it's been that long!

[chuckmiller]

That was a horrible day. I'm not sure how long it took for that news to reach Tampa. I was a junior in high school but that day was a Sunday so I may have been home.

May 9th, 1980 is when the Skyway Bridge collapsed into Tampa Bay when struck by a ship.

[crownpuller]

I remember that day but for a different reason. The news of the eruption overshadowed the news of the 'departure' of this fellow:

[skywatch]

When St. Helens blew up, my wife was three years out of university, drawing maps at the USGS. (We met about 8 years later.) Her branch chief asked for volunteers to drop their current projects and move to an emergency map: a new topological chart of the blown mountain. They were all still drawn by hand at that time, and she describes how the data kept changing from day to day, as the mountain was breathing as they charted it.

Ian Curtis... well, he was not a happy young man.

[tribe125]

I don’t remember Mount St Helen’s at all, which makes me wonder what I was paying attention to when I was twenty-five.

[OhDark30]

I do, but as a high school geography geek it was kind of up my alley :-)

[Samanator]

That was about three weeks before I graduated from High school on June 1st. I remember the news, but that was on the other side of the country so not as much in your face there. The year before Three Mile Island was a bit more real since we were about a 40 minutes away from Middletown in Gettysburg.

[tribe125]

The year before Three Mile Island was a bit more real

That I do remember, because I lived near a nuclear power station, and someone had changed the road signs to read ‘Harrisburg‘.

[Dan R]

I was one year short of graduating from college and thought it so wild what mother nature could do and did. But I lost the significance of it and many events 10 years ago when a car crash almost ended it for me. Things are gauged in what happened after that than what happened before. With the exception of my marriage and two kids, of course. Funny how the mind gauges things. But yes, the eruption was hard to comprehend!

Dan

[timefleas]

I remember it well, as we were having a late lunch in the restaurant on top of the Seattle Space Needle, and saw the first of the billowing gray clouds of ash--had to drive from Seattle to Tacoma daily, and remember the ash causing all kinds of problems for cars and their engine air filters--with the entire landscape covered in gray dust.