40 years after its famed eruption, Mt. St. Helens looms as a marvel and a threat
LA TimesOn the morning of May 18, 1980, an earthquake shook Mt. Chris Strebig, Spirit Lake project manager for the Forest Service, said a massive surge of water, mud and debris could inundate cities below and disable four Columbia River ports: Longview, Vancouver and Kalama in Washington and the Port of Portland in Oregon. “It would be somewhat of a repeat of the 1980 mudslide that went downstream.” The Forest Service proposes to drill into the debris to assess how much lake water the natural dam can safely restrain and how it might perform when the massive and long-predicted Cascadia earthquake finally strikes. “It’s an amazing area that people thought would take hundreds of years to recover, but it’s happened far faster than we thought,” said Carri LeRoy, an Evergreen State College freshwater ecologist studying watersheds that the road would bisect. Rebecca Hoffman, the Forest Service monument ranger, said helicopters were not feasible because the construction equipment was too big and the workers would need to travel to and from the lake too frequently.
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