Perhaps you remember the excitement of May 18, 1980, when Mount St. Helens blew. I was still working for IBM and living in Lawrence, Kansas. I would never have guessed that less than five years later I would be living in Washington State.
My wife, Mandy, and I visited Mt. St. Helens last week. It was our third trip. The first time was in the late 80s or early 90s. The mountain was still covered with ash. Burned trees were down. The area was bleak.
We didn’t go through the parts that have been preserved. We drove through parts that were quickly replanted.
Weyerhaeuser, the lumber company, had much of the area under management. They quickly invested $9 million to replant trees. They learned to dig through the ash and plant the trees in the dirt.
I took this picture of the longest bridge constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers. It was a pretty amazing feat.
“To restore the channels of the Colummbia River for navigation and the Toutle and Cowlitz rivers for flood control, nearly 140 million cubic yards (110 million cubic meters) of material was removed from the river channels by 1987. This is enough material to build a 12-lane highway, one foot thick, from New York to San Franscisco.)
That quote was taken from the above sign. I thought it pretty impressive accomplishment. Imagine, in 7 years, the equivalent of a 12-lane highway from New York to San Franscisco was removed. Then I thought of what the volcano had done in a matter of minutes to hours. I went back and took a picture of the first sign.
“The eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, began with the largest landslide in recorded history that deposited more than 3 billion cubic yards of sediment into the Toutle River basin.”
The Corps moved 140 million cubic yards in 7 years. The volcano moved 3 billion cubic yards in a day. In one day, the mountain moved over 21 times what the Corps moved in 7 years.
Mount St. Helens is a great reminder of what we can do when we work together. It is also a great reminder of how puny we are in comparison to the power of nature.