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By Roger Harnack
The Odessa Record 

Mount St. Helens, 40 years later

Residents remember eruption

 

Last updated 5/19/2020 at 7:56am

Aram Langhans | Special to The Record

Locals wear masks on an ash-covered downtown Odessa street following the eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980.

ODESSA - Eastern Washington residents are wearing medical masks these days due to the coronavirus pandemic.

But longtime resi- dents recall that this isn't the first time they've seen masks covering faces.

Some say they can recall the day the morn- ing that daylight turned to night – May 18, 1980. That was the day Mount St. Helens erupted.

"It was pitch black," resident Mike Cronrath recalled. "If you put your hand in front of your face, you wouldn't have been able to see it."

For days after that fateful Sunday morning, Odessa residents and other Eastern Washingtonians were in lockdown mode.

Medical masks were few and far between in rural communities, so residents made do with handkerchiefs, towels and anything else that would keep them from inhaling the volcanic ash that covered roads, vehicles, homes and businesses.

"The town was pretty much shut down for a week as we tried to clean everything," Cronrath said.

Former Odessa schools science teacher and camera club member Aram Langhans was on a club trip to Nelson, B.C., the day the mountain came to town.

But looking around today, he see's similarities between the cornavirus quarantine and the Mount St. Helens closures.

"Looking through those pictures, it's kind of like going out today" he said.

One interesting difference, he said, was that people only wore masks outside, not inside.

"There was a sign on the bank that said remove your mask when you enter," he recalled.

The camera club returned to Odessa during the evening of May 18, 1980. Travel between Davenport and Odessa was an "experience," he said.

"It was the strangest thing. There was really nobody on the highway," he said. "The first car that went by ... it was like total darkness. The ash just blocked all light (from headlamps)."

Langhans said he remembers passing only four vehicles between Davenport and Odessa.

But he made it home that night.

Resident Diane Voise didn't even get home the next day. "We got home, later," she said, noting she had been on a trip. "The trip got extended a few days longer."

Voise said she was forced to stay with relatives in Spokane a few days before being able to return home to Odessa.

And when she got home, "it was a mess."

"I remember a lot of people wearing masks," she said. "I remember a lot of people shoveling off roofs."

Voise said the com- munity came together in the wake of the ashfall.

"Everybody was helping each other out," she said.

That was the best part, Langhans added.

"I wouldn't want to go through it again, but it was a great experience to go through," he said. "Everybody banded together. We did what had to be done.

"Neighbor helping neighbor ... it was a great experience that way."

Langhans said he remembers the Washington National Guard arriving, which gave the community a moral boost.

Guardsmen were too late to help with most of the cleanup work, though.

Cronrath said that's because residents jumped into cleanup mode as soon as they could. City firetrucks and firemen also jumped right in.

"Firemen did a lot," he said. "They really carried the load."

But nearly everybody was part of the cleanup effort, he recalled, noting parents got together to clean up the park and swimming pool for the town's youth swim team.

Aram Langhans | Special to The Record

A tractor loads ash scooped from Odessa city streets onto a truck in this historic 1980 photo.

"We just kept raking all the ash and putting it in wheelbarrows," he said, adding he wore a mask the first day, but worked without it after that.

"We're pretty isolated out here, and there were few masks," he said.

He, too, said the current quarantining of residents, business closures, lack of traffic and even mask-wearing residents is reminiscent of the days following the volcanic eruption.

"It's similar in some ways, in others, not so," he said.

Stores stayed open, he said. But shelves were bare by the end of the week. Then, life generally went back to normal.

Not so today.

And the ashfall led to "phenomenal crops" for about three years after the eruption.

"Hard to believe its been 40 years," he said.

Author Bio

Roger Harnack, Publisher

Author photo

Roger Harnack is the co-owner/publisher of Free Press Publishing. Having grown up Benton City, Roger is an award-winning journalist, photographer, editor and publisher. He's one of only two editorial/commentary writers from Washington state to ever receive the international Golden Quill. Roger is dedicated to the preservation of local media, and the voice it retains for Eastern Washington.

 

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