FTV: Volcano Cowboys – part 2
In Part One, we looked at the tale of the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens up to and shortly after this cataclysmic event. The Monday after the Sunday fireworks, fellow Geography Department graduate student Mike Farrell and I started looking up information about a mountain we had never heard of. I was working as the department’s map librarian so we dug out a plastic 3-D topographic map covering that area of the Pacific Northwest. Even at 1:250,000 scale (where 1 inch equals about 4 miles), the peak of Mount St. Helens looked pretty impressive. We had no hard data yet so we started to imagine how much of the peak remained. Little did we realize St. Helens’d elevation had been reduced from 9,677 feet to 8,363 feet. With 1,314 feet removed by the blast, the new crater floor created stood at 6,279 feet inside a crater that was now 1.2 by 1.8 miles across. To give you an idea of how much the mountain was removed, Michigan’s highest peak (Mount Arvon) tops out at 1,980 feet above sea level and the deepest part of Lake Superior is 1,332 feet.
Scientists from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) flocked to Washington when the mountain first started to show signs of life. They had come in from their main western headquarters in Denver, Colorado and from their one permanent volcanic study site, the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO). Since the HVO was founded, the majority of the USGS volcanic studies had been conducted on the less explosive shield volcanoes that make up the Hawaiian Island chain. The volcanologists arriving in Washington state lacked experience studying the more explosive composite type volcanoes like St. Helens. This left them searching for ways to measure the on-going activity at MSH so they could monitor what was happening under the volcano. Earthquake data and measurements of the mountain’s ground tilt and outgassing of sulfur dioxide (SO2) told them there was magma moving deep underground. They were hard pressed to make any predictions about when an eruption might occur and some of them felt it might not erupt at all. The USGS teams were still trying to figure out what all their measurements , observations, and data meant when the mountain blew up.
The local officials and the U.S.Forest Service tried to keep people out of the area when the USGS team warned them it was just a matter of time before Saint Helens erupted. When the timeline dragged on and no eruption occurred, some limited logging was allowed to start again. Landowners, particularly those around the popular Spirit Lake recreational area, were allowed to go into the danger zone and retrieve some of their valuables. Far too many ‘lookiloos’ took to the logging roads around the mountain to get closer to the equivalent of a ticking bomb. Some of the volcano observers like Dave Johnston knew taking risks was part of their job, but they were still nervous. The public gawkers apparently had no idea how great the risks were and many of them would count toward the tragic death toll of 53 lives lost.
When I showed a video about the eruption to my classes, I always paused on a frame of the crusty old owner of the Spirit Lake Lodge, Harry Truman. Harry got a lot of press because he would stick out his chin and tell the reporters, “No, they aren’t going to get Truman to leave. I will go after the governor myself if they try to make me leave.” I would always tell my students, “Remember his stubborn old guy – he will come up again later in the story.” When the massive landslide uncorked the side blast eruption that surprised everyone (they expected it to blow up, not sideways), it pushed all the water out of Spirit Lake. When it sloshed back into place, the lake was 200 feet higher than it had been and the surface was covered with floating logs and debris. I would pause the video again and ask, “Do you remember that cantankerous old guy Harry Truman? The one who wouldn’t let them remove him from his lodge? Well, he got his wish to stay put because both he and his lodge are buried somewhere under all that rubble.”
The post eruption analysis showed the USGS scientists a multitude of things they had done wrong as they tried to predict Mt. St. Helens’ behavior. They knew the mountain’s eruption patterns from the layers of ash that had been mapped, but again, there was one part of the lesson that wasn’t told in these deposits. Explosive volcanoes like St. Helens do not always follow predictable patterns and indeed, each individual volcano can have unique characteristics in how they erupt. They vowed that the scientists who lost their lives would not be forgotten and their hard earned data would be used to get the USGS volcanologists up to speed for the next one.
Monitoring the activity at St Helens was hampered by the lack of equipment needed to track the various parameters (earthquakes, earth tilt, outgassing) needed to ‘see’ under the mountain. They got creative looking for funds to assemble a quick response team with the right stuff so they would be able to deploy on short notice. Before this task could be undertaken, the Center for Disease Control wanted to study the health consequences of breathing fine ash by those who were in the area. The USGS teams were still working under a lot of pressure to collect data in areas that were dangerous to both their physical and mental health. Dan Miller, one of the lead scientists from the Denver Group decided they all needed a way to release some of the post traumatic stress and grief that was clearly hanging in the air. His solution was to roast a pig.
After St. Helens had another lava dome destroying eruption on August 7, 1980, he had an idea: They were collecting data on the mountain daily so why not roast a pig in one of the steaming vents and throw a decompression party at the end of another long work week? The press were monitoring their communications so they used code, calling it the ‘FPP temperature experiment’ so no one would get an idea these government employees were being frivolous with tax payer’s dollars. The ‘FPP’ was short for ‘Front Page Palmer’ in honor of a local geology professor who constantly ‘roasted’ the USGS survey people’s work in his comments to the press. Miller thought they could roast the pig and Palmer at the same time even if it was just going to be an inside joke.
They tried a trial run with a couple of chickens (‘Chicken Little and His Brother’) to make sure the sulfur dioxide coming from the vents would not ruin the taste. When the test was completed (“They were wonderful,” according to Miller), a fifty-pound pig was ordered and they followed a precise recipe: “The pig was stuffed with fresh oysters, chickens, whole lemons, huge bulbs of garlic, and fresh rosemary. Miller sewed up the pig with wire, spiced the outside, covered it up with spinach leaves, and then wrapped all that up with banana leaves imported from the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. Wrapped in burlap and chicken wire, the pig was hoisted up using a steel bar run through the wire and flown by helicopter to ‘the red zone’.”
When they found a promising steam vent, they dug a hole, inserted the pig, poured two six-packs of beer over it and buried it. After doing a brief Hawaiian chant, they inserted a thermocouple to monitor the temperature and left to do their other sampling. When they checked it at midday, it was still raw and only up to room temperature. They flew back in and were delighted when they found a different spot that was still 575 degrees F at a shallow depth. In the excitement, one of the scientists monitoring the FPP experiment radioed Miller to, “Bring up the (expletive deleted) pig”. The ‘Front Page Palmer experiment’ was relocated but not before soaking Miller’s clothing in the marinating juices.
The party was on when Miller keyed his mike and reported, “Vancouver, this is Five Six Yankee. We’ve completed the FPP temperature experiment and we’re bringing home the bacon.”
The cookout had its intended result and helped the team move forward to the important work they needed to do to assemble the new rapid response team protocols. Miller considered sending the recipe to Gourmet magazine but did not, fearing the FPP experiment would draw criticism about them wasting tax dollars when they would need public money to fund further research.
The first opportunity to test their findings and new protocols came in May of 1982. Miller was attending a conference on geothermal potential when a presentation by Alan Ryall got his attention. Ryall detailed that, “The entire eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains had been jumping with quakes for decades. Then, in the early 1970s, the region became unusually quiet. Behavior changed again in 1978 with a large quake (magnitude 5.4) which was followed by hundreds of smaller earthquakes.” Miller recognized the patterns as being similar to what they had recorded at St. Helens only there were no volcanoes in the area where the activity was concentrated. What they found was far more chilling – the activity was taking place under the large Long Lake Caldera formed in the Mammoth lakes region. A massive eruption some 760,000 years ago formed the caldera and would have made St. Helens sound like a party favor. The collapse following the Long Lake eruption created a feature 12 miles wide and 18 miles long. Before the conference ended, the activity had begun to ramp up again and the USGS rapid response team moved to get their monitoring gear in place.
The public was not as concerned about these ominous events as the USGS. Even the local officials were not keen to sound any alarms in fear of it harming their tourist driven economy. The only route into this heavily used recreational area (which would see tens of thousands of skiers on the Mammoth Lake slopes each week) ran right through the caldera. Two local commissioners who finally pushed to improve a logging road through the mountains in the opposite direction (officially called a ‘scenic route’ but dubbed the ‘Mammoth Escape Route’ by locals) were thrown out of office in a recall election. The activity the team was monitoring eventually wound down and the USGS was accused of causing undue panic.
Accusations of the survey ‘overreacting’ came from Ryall himself, the scientist who had put them on the trail of the Mammoth Lakes activity. Some of the locals and business people criticized them for putting the brakes on the once robust real estate and tourist economy. Again, lessons were learned and the survey reviewed how this kind of information needed to be handled for public consumption in the future. Had the Long Lake Caldera erupted, would they have been vilified for not taking enough precautions in light of the staggering death toll? The critics did not account for the survey team’s horrific experiences and loss of life at Mt. St. Helens.
To better understand how the clues about explosive volcanic eruptions can provide a clearer picture when working with current activity, the team members began examining various volcanic hotspots around the world. At a volcano called Lamington in Papua New Guinea (PNG), Rick Hoblitt uncovered evidence that a 1951 eruption of that mountain that was not a ‘directional blast’ as they had seen at St. Helens. The distribution of ash and pyroclastic layers at Lamington were spread evenly on all sides of the volcano. Hoblitt reasoned this eruption had killed nearly three thousand people when the dense cloud rising above the crater came crashing down with such force that it incinerated everything in its path.
At the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Columbia, they gained insights about a different kind of volcanic danger: mudflows (also known as ‘lahars’). Evidence showed that the towns and farms in the shadow of Nevado del Ruiz were built on top of massive mudflows released in an 1845 eruption. Columbian naturalist Joaquin Acosta’s description in a journal for the Academy of Science states: “The immense flood of thick mud which rapidly filled the bed of the Lagunillas River swept down the mountain and covered up or swept away the trees and houses, burying men and animals. The entire population perished in the upper part and narrower parts of the Lagunillas valley.” When the survey team studied the area a hundred years later, the rich soil had brought back a thriving population with no historic memory of what came before.
Beginning in November of 1984, steam vents on Ruiz were reported to be unusually active and earthquakes were being felt on the mountain. The town of Armero and its population of over twenty nine thousand people was built on top of the historic lahars about thirty miles from Ruiz. The USGS team began monitoring the situation and attempted to educate the local politicians and population of the dangers. The response was typical. The local Chamber of Commerce warned that, “Irresponsible reporting of the hazard areas (mapped by the USGS) would cause economic losses.” Even the local archbishop accused them of committing ‘volcanic terrorism’. Conflicting statements by the government left people confused: were they in danger or not and if warned of approaching lahars, would they be able to escape?
On November 13, Nevado del Ruiz began shaking and sending out ash. Still the river cities were told to, “Stand by to sound the alarm – if necessary.” When the eruption turned magmatic, it only put out one-tenth the material that had been seen at St. Helens, but the pyroclastic material ejected reached 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit. As the glacier and snowpack on the eastern face began to melt, the melt water, hot ash, and rock debris began funneling down the drainage chutes at speeds approaching 100 MPH. When the flood of debris and mud the consistency of wet concrete reached the Lagunillas River, it began a three mile drop toward Armero. When the flow reached the village of ChinChina, it destroyed three bridges, 200 houses and killed 1,100 people in ten minutes. The lahar was still an hour away from Armero.
At 11:35 p.m., the 130 foot high wall of mud, water, and debris burst out of the valley just above the village with ‘a roar like a swarm of fighter jets’. As it broke out of the canyon that was confining it, it spread out, dropping the height to 30 feet and the speed to 25 MPH. According to author Thompson, “As the mass swept through town, it was so powerful that it cut down building after building and leveled the city’s tallest and perhaps strongest structure, the church. In the darkness of those first few minutes, perhaps ten thousand people were swept away into the lahar. The thick, rocky flood rolled over Armero in waves for almost two hours. The rushing mud never subsided to less than six feet , and in some places, never under fifteen feet.”
Twenty-one thousand died and Barry Voight, the landslide expert from Penn State who had weighed in on Mt. St. Helens wrote the definitive paper analyzing the failures of the Ruiz eruption. He cited the biggest hurdle in the quest to predict the behavior of volcanoes; their unpredictable nature. Volcanologist’s ability to warn populations was improving, but it was not perfect. The keys to saving lives are getting the public to understand the dangers and respond to warnings given. As long as these warnings are dismissed over concerns about economic losses or inconvenience, lives will continue to be at stake. The learning curve in these matters took a sharp curve upward between Mt. St. Helens and the publication of Volcano Cowboys in 2000. It will be interesting to see what has happened in the field over the last quarter of a century. Stay tuned.
A quick update: I put the finishing touches on this FTV while visiting the WOAS FM West Bureau in Eugene, Oregon. On September 16, 2025, the day after I got home, an alarming ashfall came from Mount St. Helens and it stretched far north of the mountain. It was later determined that 45 mph winds blowing through the caldera had stirred up old ash deposits from the 1980 eruption and the mountain. Much to the relief of local residents, St. Helens showed no signs of new volcanic activity.
Top Piece Video: Couldn’t find another gem of a volcano song so as long as the volcanologists can work as a team, I will lean on our of B-3 playing friend from Australia, Lachey Doley . . . you might recognize the tune!