May 18, 1980, is a day that lives in Northwest infamy. On that fateful day, Mount St. Helens erupted with an explosive fury.
Although the day of the eruption is what most people remember, the build-up to the event started weeks earlier.
Earthquakes rattled the area in March. Those rumblings preceded the volcano’s first eruption in over 100 years, on March 27.
“When the mountain started to awake on March 27, it was exciting in this area,” Mark Smith told KATU News. Smith’s family owned the “Spirit Lake Lodge” at Mount St. Helens.
See more bonus content, extended interviews, and archive footage of the eruption.
“People didn’t really know what a volcano was. We see them in Hawaii, and there’s something in a far-off land. But here, suddenly, one of our Cascade volcanoes, which we all thought were dormant, awoke,” he said.
Smith sat down with KATU to recount how he witnessed the cataclysmic eruption on May 18 from the beginning. He later watched from just feet away as two massive, destructive mudflows, called lahars, swept down the Toutle River system.
The family lodge was swallowed up in the blast.
Smith is one of three eyewitnesses who shared their experiences that day with KATU for this documentary.
Smith was joined by retired KATU photojournalist Bob Foster. Foster was on the front lines as KATU covered the volcano’s eruption cycle and even had his own close call with what Mount St. Helens unleashed that day.
KATU also spoke with Chris Ballew, who got caught up in the eruption’s massive ash cloud with his mother and brother as it moved east. He recalled to us their harrowing journey through the cloud as they tried to get home to Seattle from Spokane in hot, dusty darkness.
See more bonus content, extended interviews, and archive footage of the eruption.
In 1980, there was no U.S. Geological Survey office (USGS) in the Northwest.
As the volcano awoke, the agency sent scientists from Hawai’i and Denver to study what was happening.
“There had been quite a bit of study of Mount St. Helens prior to 1980. We knew the volcano was an explosive volcano,” said Dr. Jon Major, Scientist in Charge at the Cascades Volcano Observatory.
“We knew that it had erupted frequently. We knew that it was capable of producing these large volcanic mud flows. We knew it was capable of producing what we call pyroclastic flows, which were these kind of hot, dry flows that can rush off a volcano. We knew that it was capable of ejecting large amounts of volcanic material into the atmosphere that would get carried downwind as this volcanic ashfall. So all of that was known. And when the 1980 eruption happened, what was a bit of a surprise was the magnitude of that, what they call the lateral blast, the big event that swept across the landscape,” Major added.
That blast covered 230 square miles.
The eruption also triggered volcanic lahars that swept down the Toutle River system and other waterways, wiping out everything in their path.
In its aftermath, 57 people were killed and more than 200 homes were lost. Over a billion dollars in damage was caused to roads, railways, bridges, and other infrastructure.
“The May 18 eruption of 1980 is known internationally as one of the most important eruptions of the modern era,” said research geologist Alexa Van Eaton.
Seeing what Mount St. Helens was capable of ushered in a new era of volcanic study in the Northwest.
Two years after the eruption, then-President Ronald Reagan and Congress created the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. Its purpose: research, recreation, and education.
“It’s just a really unique and treasured landscape that is known globally and lived locally,” said Jon Gellings of the National Forest Service. Gellings served as district ranger and Monument Manager for Mount St. Helens.
“And it’s got lots more that… seeks to be understood. It’s just whether we’re able to listen and hear what it’s telling us,” Gellings said.
See more bonus content, extended interviews, and archive footage of the eruption.
The same year, the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory was established in Vancouver, Wash.
“Over the past few decades, we’ve really taken on a lot more public outreach and public engagement, really trying to educate emergency managers about the volcanoes in their backyard, what those volcanoes are capable of doing, what the hazards are, and also expanding our monitoring network,” Major said.
The Cascades Volcano Observatory is now the largest of USGS’s five offices, with around 80 permanent staff.
Mount. St Helens also has the largest monitoring network in the Cascades, with more than 20 monitoring stations placed on and around the volcano. Through those stations and other tools, scientists track all kinds of volcanic activity including earthquakes, gases escaping from the earth, and how magma moving underground could be deforming the land above it, among other things.
The scientists at the Cascades Volcano Observatory gave KATU a tour of the facility. We got the chance to speak with several of their scientists about their work studying the volcano, and how they are using that research to prepare for the future, when Mount St. Helens might wake up again. That includes the study of rocks from past eruptions to understand what’s happening with the magma deep underground before it reaches the surface, and analyzing ash clouds and pyroclastic flows above ground.
According to the USGS, Mount St. Helens is the most active volcano in the lower 48 states and the most likely in the Cascades to erupt again.
If it does, the USGS would begin raising the alert level for the volcano. That would trigger interaction, and if needed, a response from several agencies from the federal level down to local.
KATU learned firsthand from some of those agencies what that coordinated response would look like, through an incident command structure.
“That’s a federal structure that we all have to be trained in through FEMA to be able to get grant funding,” Skamania County Sheriff Summer Scheyer said. “It all starts with your baseline ICS Structure, where we are all on the same page. We know what this is going to look like if there’s a major incident and who’s in command, and how the command structure works. But then, how do you have communication if something’s going on and we have email list distributions, you know, we’re always in communication if there’s something.”
“The current collaboration that’s taking place between federal, state, and local partners to determine who’s going to contact who is really critically important,” said Cowlitz County Emergency Manager Larry Hembree.
Hembree said that during the events leading up to the eruption of 1980, there was a lot of confusion, and nobody really knew who was in charge.
“My ask of folks is that if they think something’s happening, notify the local jurisdiction, whoever that might be, so that they can at least have a plan of action,” Hembree said. “So if it goes to, ‘Yeah, this is really an incident,’ then we’re able to put that out immediately rather than work to find the information, figure out what’s going on, and then put out an alert. The difference of an hour or two can make a tremendous amount of difference.”
Preparedness and response also happen at home.
“Evacuations are a very difficult thing to do. It’s not just get in your car and leave,” Hembree noted.
Emergency responders recommend becoming “Volcano Ready.” Familiarize yourself with the “Ready. Set. Go.” evacuation warning levels. Prepare a “go kit,” and have enough supplies at home to last for two weeks should a disaster strike.
Scientists at the USGS say that, right now, Mount St. Helens is showing normal levels of background activity.
“When I talk about background activity, a lot of people think that I just mean that there’s nothing happening under there,” Weston Thelen said.
Thelen is a research seismologist at the Cascades Volcano Observatory.
“And in fact, it’s the case that a lot of these volcanoes have earthquakes in their background and they have swarms in their background activity,” he explained.
It’s when they start seeing activity outside of a volcano’s established patterns that they start to pique their interest. That actually started to happen in 2004.
“We saw an increase in high-frequency earthquakes, those earthquakes that look just like any other earthquake happening anywhere else in the Pacific Northwest. But they’re very small, and they’re happening right underneath the volcano from faults just slipping. And then that trended into more long-period earthquakes,” said Thelen. “And in the case of 2004, that was a really smooth transition. It was something that was pretty straightforward to understand what was happening and to forecast.”
That activity in 2004 turned into a series of small explosions and dome growth eruptions that happened periodically through 2008.
See more bonus content, extended interviews, and archive footage of the eruption.
There’s no imminent eruption threat from Mount St. Helens today. But when it does eventually start to stir again, will we see another 1980-level eruption?
“I think that the chances that we are going to see a May 18, 1980-size eruption again are relatively minimal,” Major said. “The volcano essentially gutted itself, so there’s a lot less mass on the volcano now.”
“Mount St. Helens has had a history of falling apart, re-growing, falling apart, and re-growing. So now we’re in the regroup, we’re now going back into a re-growing phase,” he added.
The Cascades Volcano Observatory offers a free “volcano notification service” anyone can sign up for. They’ll email you updates on what’s going on with Mount St. Helens and other Cascades volcanoes.
Counties also have emergency alert services you can sign up for. We have more information on how to sign up below:
Sunday, May 18, 2025, is the 45th Anniversary of the eruption of Mount St. Helens.
A public event marking the anniversary is being held Sunday at the Science and Learning Center at Coldwater off of Spirit Lake Highway.
The event runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Experts from the Washington Emergency Management Division, USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory, the Mount St. Helens Institute, National Volcanic Monument Rangers, and more will be on hand to answer questions.
If you’d like a peek at the volcano from home, the official webcam for Mount. St. Helens is also now back online, two years after its power was knocked out due to a landslide.
Nearby Johnston Ridge Observatory and Highway 504 (Spirit Lake Highway) at Mile Post 45.2 remains closed from the 2023 landslide.
Repairs to the highway won’t be completed until 2027 at the earliest, and it will still take additional time to reopen Johnston Ridge Observatory.
