Sandy Santori remembers the dark cloud that covered Trail, B.C., beginning May 18, 1980. It filled the sky with a colourless gloom, as fine ash fell to the ground.
“It was just no sunshine. It was just gloomy, grey, black. It was scary,” he said.
Santori was 26 years old, and first learned of the situation when his mother called him out of the house. There was a scene on the street. His neighbours, mostly Italian Canadians, were hurriedly covering their freshly planted gardens, unsure where the fine, dusty ash was coming from.
“Everybody at that time thought there was a malfunction at Teck Cominco and that they were emitting something out of the [smelter] stacks that we’d never seen before,” said Santori, who would later go on to be mayor of Trail, an MLA and B.C. cabinet minister.
Before long, word spread through the community that the ash was coming from Mount St. Helens, a volcano that had erupted with tremendous force that morning, more than 450 kilometres away in Washington state.
The May 18 eruption is considered the worst volcanic disaster in U.S. history. It killed nearly 60 people and altered landscapes in Washington state.
In Canada, the effects weren’t as lethal, but they were still felt across southern B.C.
Blast wave strikes Vancouver
It began on B.C.’s South Coast, as the blast wave from the eruption bounced off the upper atmosphere and returned to earth in Metro Vancouver and southern Vancouver Island.
A CBC News story that aired a year after the eruption described the blast as being “slightly smaller than the strength needed to knock out every single window” in Vancouver and Victoria.
Ian Thomson was a 27-year-old geologist at the time. He was at his parents’ home in West Vancouver when he heard the blast. He had been closely following the Mount St. Helens story, as the volcano had been increasingly active in the months leading up to the eruption. But the sound still came as a mystery.
“All of a sudden I heard a huge bang,” he said. “Something must have exploded.”
Thomson thought maybe trains had collided in a nearby rail yard, or that his sister might have driven a car into the side of the house.
Within five minutes, he said, there was a radio news bulletin explaining that the volcano had erupted.
“My second thought was, ‘Gee, I bet you this is not good,'” he said, thinking of the tragedy that was unfolding in Washington.
Falling ash
After the blast wave came the ash. The fine particles took hours, and even days in some places, to make its way from the volcano to communities in southern B.C. where it blanketed the landscape.
Santori’s community of Trail was close to the concentrated plume of volcanic ash and smoke, which mostly drifted northeast from Mount St. Helens over places like Creston, Fernie and even Lethbridge, Alta.
Further north, in Kamloops, B.C., Paula Kelley, a then 22-year-old bookkeeper at the local newspaper, witnessed the ash arrive. It had been a sunny day with clouds, before it began to appear.
“I was downtown in the city, so you could just see it falling everywhere and you would see it on all the cars. Everyone was having to clean their windshields and everything and it’s just, like — we were all thinking, ‘like, this is so far away,'” said Kelley. “It was really odd.”
She described it as sort of dystopian, though nobody appeared to be wearing masks or anything to protect themselves from the volcanic ash. Within a week, the city, which is more than 500 kilometres from the volcano, had gone back to normal, with little trace of the ash, Kelley said.
Researching the ash
Britta Jensen, a geologist and associate professor at the University of Alberta, is part of a team that has been researching the way Mount St. Helens ash spread in Canada. She said before her team began its work in 2019, little was known about the subject — dispersion maps stopped at the Canada-U.S. border.
“Most places in B.C. — even high [ash] accumulation rates — it probably wouldn’t have actually been much more than a thickness of a credit card, maybe two, so maybe two millimetres, one millimetre or so,” said Jensen.
Santori remembers having to hose off the car and driveway, washing the ash into storm drains. He says it wasn’t like wildfire ash — but much finer, like a dust that turned to mud when it got wet.
Jensen’s team surveyed about 400 people who remembered the ash, even hearing from people as far away as Edmonton and Yellowknife with evidence of a fine dusting.
“A lot of people mentioned how it just darkened things. Like everything was so much darker and I can imagine how apocalyptic it would feel if you were sitting there and it was a beautiful sunny day and having this massive cloud come in and block the sun,” she said.
Jensen, who has examined Mount St. Helens ash deposits across Western Canada, says the 1980 eruption was on the smaller side compared to what took place during the prior 4,000 years.
“Mount St. Helens has this incredible history of erupting and erupting a lot,” she said. “She builds herself up and then she blows her top. We look at the record from her and I could see another eruption happening in our lifetime, but maybe it’s going to be 200 years from now, we don’t know.”
It’s been 45 years since Mount St. Helens erupted — and scientists say it will erupt again in our lifetime. Johanna Wagstaffe breaks down what will make it different from the deadly blast in 1980 and how today’s technology is giving us an early warning system.
