Eastern Washington Has Risen From the Ashes

There’s nothing new about Western Washington dumping on Eastern Washington. The West Side has been sending its trash to East Side landfills for years.

But the eruption of Mt. St. Helens 20 years ago elevated that incongruity to a level few could have imagined before the sky began falling that Sunday morning.

The clouds of volcanic ash carried by an east-northeastern wind darkened the Eastern Washington skies and left up to six inches of ash on the ground in Yakima, Moses Lake, the Tri-Cities, Spokane and dozens of other smaller towns.

Twenty years later, signs of the eruption are still clearly visible at the mountain. The blast knocked 1,300 feet off the once cone-shaped peak, and the surrounding landscape is still far from the dense forest it once was.

But to the east, you have to look hard or dig deep to see any evidence of the cataclysm.

Most of the ash has settled into the soil. Pockets of the gray stuff can still be seen along roadsides or in low spots in Eastern Washington’s Channeled Scablands, a rocky area scoured by raging flood waters thousands of years ago.

A fraction of the ash ended up bottled and sold in souvenir shops or stored for posterity in closets.

But two decades later, is there really any point in keeping the stuff around?

William Schillinger doesn’t think so.

“I had been keeping several quart jars of ash, and I finally threw it out when I was doing some spring cleaning a couple years ago,” said Schillinger, an agronomist at a Washington State University research station in Lind, 75 miles southwest of Spokane.

“At the time [just after the eruption], I thought it was so unique.”

Gary Lobe still stores ash in a 50-gallon metal barrel in a barn on his wheat farm outside Lind.

His wife had nearly forgotten about the barrel until a reporter called.

“I’m not sure what we’re going to do with it,” Sharon Lobe said.

Lind, population 462, has gone out of its way to preserve its claim as one of the communities most severely affected by the ash fallout. Two signs on U.S. 395 outside town offer an invitation to travelers: “Welcome to Lind. Drop in--Mt. St. Helens did!”

Things weren’t so lighthearted just after the eruption. Health officials, unsure of the ash content, issued bulletins urging people to stay indoors. Cities sent urgent pleas for surgical masks. And clogged air and oil filters forced many motorists to abandon their vehicles and seek emergency help.

In the longer term, the ash raised questions about the impact on Eastern Washington’s farmland. Farmers feared a disaster, and scientists quickly conducted tests to determine whether the ash contained anything harmful.

At Washington State University’s Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, David Bezdicek and some colleagues scooped ash from a campus tennis court and went to work.

Their finding: the ash contained slightly elevated levels of one heavy metal--cadmium--but otherwise nothing that might harm humans or plants.

“We compared it to regular sand,” said Bezdicek, still a faculty member at WSU. “It was more of a dilution effect on the soil than anything else.”

Agricultural damages from the eruption in Washington reached $55 million by the end of 1980, or about a quarter of the amount projected a few days after the eruption. Some of the losses stemmed from increased wear and tear to farm machinery from the gritty ash.

Apple growers used high-pressure hoses to spray the ash off trees, and wheat farmers tilled ash into the soil. Production of both crops increased in 1980 compared with the previous year, with wheat breaking a record.

“I think most growers would say they didn’t notice any change” from the ash, WSU agronomist Schillinger said. “Our farm fields pretty much incorporated the ash, and life went on.”