© JACK SMITH/AP
Mount St. Helens spews smoke, soot and ash into the sky in Washington state following a major eruption on May 18, 1980.
May 17, 1980, 40 years ago today, was a beautiful day on the mountain in southwest Washington. It was also the most significant day of Carolyn Driedger's life.
She and a colleague had traveled to the active volcano Mount St. Helens to drop off equipment at a U.S. geological station. They planned to stay the night, but geologist David Johnston, tasked with monitoring the mountain, warned them against it.
"He said, 'Let's just have as few people here as possible,'" Driedger recalled. "We were very disappointed that we were not going to spend the night looking at this beautiful volcano. The sun was just starting to set. We stopped and I took a couple of last photos of Mount St. Helens."
The next morning, at 8:37 a.m., Mount St. Helens erupted - a disaster unlike any other in American history.
The news reported it as "the most violent eruption of this volcano in 32,000 years."
"The energy that came out of Mount St. Helens that day is bigger than any nuclear weapon than we have in our arsenal," said Steve Olson, author of
"Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens" (W.W. Norton). "The whole northern flank of the volcano collapsed into this valley," he said, "and that let out this burst of pressure that had been building up inside the volcano."
The blast triggered the largest landslide in recorded history, flattening trees for 220 square miles, with a cloud of smoke, ash and pumice. In all, 57 people died.
Comment: It's rather incredible that such important knowledge, and from what seems to be only our recent past, could have been lost. And yet it is but one of the many stunning reminders that this forgetting seems to be part of a repeating pattern: