Mount St. Helens recovering from eruption 20 years ago

On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens' summit and much of its north flank crumbled in a huge landslide, triggering massive explosions that ripped through the sliding debris

Volcano site draws 3 million tourists a year

May 18, 2000
Web posted at: 10:47 a.m. EDT (1447 GMT)

In this story: Scientist died during the blast 'We have more deer than we had before' RELATED STORIES, SITES

From San Francisco Bureau Chief Greg Lefevre

MOUNT ST. HELENS, Washington (CNN) -- Life has returned, sometimes flourishing, on a mountainside in Washington state where, 20 years ago, a massive sideways blast vaporized forests in 5,000-degree heat and flattened hundreds of miles of timberland.

Mount St. Helens, whose eruption killed 57 people, many of whom vanished beneath tons of ash, stunned scientists with its ferocity -- so much so that it is now the most studied volcano in the world.

VIDEO CNN's Greg Lefevre talks with scientists about the explosion. Real 28K 80K Windows Media 28K 80K     VOLCANOES 101 Learn what causes a volcano to erupt     ALSO Mount St. Helens, 20 years later: a reporter remembers     MESSAGE BOARD Nature's Wrath

"We first thought it was a forest fire, then we knew it was the mountain," said one onlooker. "You could see it burning and churning, kind of rumble. We were right under it."

Scientists who watched it blow, now say the eruption began with a modest earthquake, enough to loosen the already unstable mountainside.

"And that released the pressure that was holding the molten rock inside the volcano," said Peter Lipman, Senior Research Scientist in the U.S. Geological Survey.

"Then a number of seconds after they observed the landslide, they saw the first ash cloud come out and the big explosions begin."

Lipman said the events 20 years ago today involved "an earthquake, a landslide, a horizontally directed explosion, a vertically directed explosion. And the resulting deposits are immensely complicated."

Lipman had flown to Mount St. Helens in the spring of 1980 to study what was then just a rumbling mountain. Fellow- scientist and friend David Johnston died in the blast.

He is memorialized outside his old office with a chunk of the volcano he died studying.

Now tourist helicopters fly over the volcano's edge. About 3 million people a year visit the 100,000-acre national preserve.

Much of the land will seem stricken for centuries, but amid the dust, life has begun again.

"It is beautiful," said Bob Andrew, of the U.S. Forest Service. "Wildflowers all over, we have lots and lots of wild elk and deer. In fact, we have more deer than we had before."

The fury of Mount St. Helens 20 years ago has triggered scientists' attention to Oregon's Mount Hood and Washington's Mount Rainier.

Both are geologic cousins of Mount St. Helens ... and both are capable of wreaking the same destruction.

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USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory (CVO)
Mount St Helens

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