Did 57 people have to die at Mount St. Helens?

Interview with geologist who forecast 1980 blast sheds light on that question

On a Sunday morning 43 years ago today, Mount St. Helens blasted away its summit, laid waste to an immense expanse of forest and snuffed out the lives of 57 people.

I’ve always wondered: Did those people have to die?  An interview I  conducted this week gave me some further insights into that question and a possible answer to one of  the enduring mysteries of that time.

In the days and months that followed the eruption, the disaster was dubbed a worst-case scenario that no one could have foreseen and that, in some respects, unleashed more fury than the youthful volcano had ever vented before.

But about three weeks earlier, unbeknownst to the public and few outside the scientific community, a geologist  issued an alert that proved eerily accurate.

Penn State University geologist Barry Voight warned the U.S. Geological Survey that the growing bulge on the north flank could collapse and “uncork” magma and pressurized, water-saturated rock that would flash and thunder laterally across the landscape like a planetary cannon blast.

That is, of course, exactly what happened and why people died up to 14 miles from the summit.

I and other journalists have reported on Voight’s work before, but with the generation of scientists who pioneered studies at Mount St. Helens aging and passing on, I wanted to catch up with Voight one more time. I called him Tuesday at his home in State College, where he is a professor emeritus at Penn State. 

From the upper Toutle Valley, geologist Barry Voight scans Mount St. Helens in April 1980 during one of the ash plumes that burst out of the volcano prior to its shattering eruption on May 18, 1980. Photo Courtesy of Barry Voight

Voight, now 85,  remembers his first visit to Mount St. Helens vividly. He’d already established himself as an expert on massive rockslides and avalanches. In the late 1970s, he had published two 800-page books on examples from North and South America. So it was natural to consult him when the mountain’s north flank started swelling five feet a day in the spring of 1980.

He arrived at the request of Dwight “Rocky” Crandell, who along with Donal Mullineaux wrote in 1978 that Mount St. Helens was “an especially dangerous volcano” that could erupt before the end of the 20th century.

Voight remembers his first flight to the volcano aboard a helicopter around April 12. In just three weeks since March 20, earthquakes, rising molten rock and steam explosions had cracked, bloated and disfigured the volcano’s famous, snow-clad symmetry.

He became concerned immediately.

“It was all pretty alarming. Something big was happening,  and it was happening very fast,” Voight recalled.

Still, on the following day he drove up the Toutle Valley and spent a couple days camped near what was then Coldwater Creek, just several miles west of the volcano’s summit. Snow prevented him from getting closer, but, yes, he was concerned about his safety.

He recalled what had happened in 1902 in Martinique, where pyroclastic flows— avalanches of hot rock and gas —  from Mount Pelee killed 30,000 people in the town of Saint-Pierre. He realized the topography around Mount St. Helens would steer any pyroclastic flows his way

He returned to USGS makeshift offices at the U.S. Forest Service station in Vancouver and reported verbally to Crandell, telling him that a massive slope failure was a real possibility, that it could reach Spirit Lake and could trigger an eruption and a pyroclastic explosion. He drew a diagram that remained posted at the USGS office until after May 18. After several more days of meetings and and briefings, he flew home to Pennsylvania on about April 19 and wrote a detailed, 26-page report that was sent to the USGS in mid May.

On the afternoon of May 18, he got a call from Crandell.

“ ‘It happened just as you predicted.’  Rocky said. I had no idea how big the blast was. But the size of the landslide did not surprise me at all.”

It was, in fact, the largest landslide in recorded history. About 2.3 cubic kilometers of the volcano toppled northward, burying the upper 16 or 17 miles of the Toutle Valley for an average of 150 feet deep. At its deepest it would bury Seattle’s 605-foot Space Needle.

“You could hardly have imagined a worse case scenario. … I had studied the biggest landslides in the United States up to that time. … This was orders of magnitude bigger.”

Oddly — even given the calamitous nature of events — the USGS did not tout Voight’s work, although it did hire him to supervise a study of the landslide after May 18.

“I thought it was surprising at the time that not much was being made of (his prediction) within the USGS, maybe because I wasn’t originally part of the USGS, but some folks (within the agency) did recognize the uniqueness of it,” Voight said.

A bigger question, of course, remains why Voight’s fears had not been relayed to the general public as the bulge grew ominously before May 18. Mullineaux and others did speak of a potential killer slide. However, they gave no real warning about the potential for a lateral explosion, which killed most of the victims.

Voight gets careful here, saying he does not want to disparage Crandell or Mullineaux, who grew immensely in  his estimation as time went on. Mullineaux, a cautious and understated scientist who disliked going beyond facts he was sure about,  hated being cast into the role of public spokesman for the USGS, Voight said.

Voight’s written report arrived at the USGS within days of the eruption , and the hastily written document may have been too technical even for some USGS scientists, he said. In addition, conflicting perspectives within the agency may also have played a role in suppressing news of his report, and some of the geologists staff almost resented Voight’s warnings because they expected a vertical eruption, he said. Finally, he could have been wrong and the mountain could have initially blown skyward, Voight said.

Still, some in the agency took his warnings seriously. Volcanologist Dan Miller, for example, had planned to take an armored vehicle to protect USGS geologist David Johnston, who died while monitoring the mountain from a ridge opposite north of the mountain. (It’s unlikely the armored vehicle would have saved Johnston, who was never found.)

Voight said he knows that Miller on May 16 relayed his written report and concerns to Robert “Bob” Tokarczyk, the supervisor then of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest,  which manages the land that included the volcano.  Tokarczyk, who retired in 1983  and died this past February, forwarded the information to the office of Washington Gov. Dixy Lee Ray that very day, Voight said. However, to the forester “it just seemed to be too spectacular. He thought it was alarmist.”

Voight’s report landed on the governor’s desk along with a request from Cowlitz County Sheriff Les Nelson to dramatically expand the state’s restricted “red” and “blue” zones around the mountain the week before that fateful weekend. Both that request and Voight’s report were still sitting on Ray’s desk - unacted upon - as the catastrophe unfolded that Sunday morning.

I’ve often wondered whether Voight’s concerns — perhaps shared by a geologist in the know— led to Nelson’s recommendation. Former Skamania County Sheriff  William “Bill” Closner revealed in 1981 that a USGS scientist had privately nudged him about the inadequacy of the restricted zones in the first half of May 1980.  Closner to this day declines to reveal that scientist’s identity. (The volcano is located in Skamania County just to the east of Cowlitz County.)

Several writers have speculated that the scientist was Crandell, who knew about Voight’s work. Voight doubts this, saying Crandell had been away in mid late May. (Crandell died in 2009.) But could he have tipped off the sheriffs in late April or early May, before Voight’s written report arrived? And if the sheriffs weren’t told of Voight’s concerns, why not? That would be negligence on someone’s part.

As it was, the danger zones in place that Sunday excluded all Weyerhaeuser Co. timberlands to the north and west of the volcano — the direction where the bulge was pointing as magma heaved the mountain’s flank outward. And that’s where most people died. Only three of the victims are known to have been in the restricted areas, and all three — including Mount St. Helens Lodge owner Harry Truman — were there legally. Many of those who died were just there to fish and camp and had no view or interest in the volcano, people such as John and Christy Killian of Vader and Terry Crall and Karen Varner of Longview.

“The (hazard) zonation was absolutely nuts” because it excluded company timberlands just a few miles from the volcano, Voight said.

Had the zones been dramatically expanded that Friday, could they have been put in effect in advance of that weekend?  Would people have heeded it? Like the COVID outbreak, competing opinions and conflicting perceptions of the danger and, in some cases, refusal to heed authority garbled the situation and undercut perceptions of the danger..

Remember that scores of cabin owners had gone to Spirit Lake to retrieve belongings on Saturday, May 17. They were scheduled to return the next day.  Remember, too, that state roadblocks on Spirit Lake Highway were unmanned because the state patrol’s district commander, Dick Bullock, refused to put his troopers in jeopardy. Remember the “carnival atmosphere” especially around Harry Truman. Finally, remember that the death toll would have been much higher if the eruption occurred on a Monday, when loggers would have been working.

In the final analysis,  one of the tragedies of Mount St. Helens was the failure to heed or broadcast a doomsday scenario — and to recognize that volcanic eruptions can surpass historical precedents.  The past does not limit the violence of the future.

His brief stint at Mount St. Helens changed Voight’s life  — and led him to personal sorrow as well as international notoriety.

The USGS hired him to help study the landslide, and through the years he was dispatched to volcanoes all over the world any time they showed signs of slope instability. His work at Nevado del Ruiz in Colombia documented how human failure to assess and heed warnings led to the deaths of 25,000 people in the area of Armero in 1985. 

“A major general lesson was that scientists, who had the best appreciation of the true hazard, needed to shoulder more social responsibility—to ensure that an appropriate and effectively delivered message reached the people at risk,” Voight told EOS Science News in 2020. 

The USGS, which assiduously avoided making safety recommendations prior to May 18, now more actively informs the public and officials of volcanic hazards. The guidance today is that the science is not done until the public hears and understands it. It was a lesson that came at a cost of 57 lives here, and thousands elsewhere.

At Mount St. Helens, Voight joined others in guiding graduate student Harry Glicken’s work on the landslide. Their work helped lead to recognition that volcanic collapses like the one on May 1980 are far from rare, as previously thought.

Glicken died in an explosive eruption at Mount Unzen in Japan in 1991. It was a significant loss, said Voight, who acknowledges that danger goes with being a volcanologist and that he’s put himself at risk many times but tries to manage and assess it. 

“I’ve probably used up two lives of a nine-lived cat,” he mused.

Voight has no trace of bitterness that he has not received more public recognition for his forecast of the Mount St. Helens tragedy. The experience led “to a number of important assignments, formally or informally, through USGS connections and recommendations. 

“I never had any sour grapes about it.  My career changed in a fortunate way, and I am grateful for it.”