Science: Decoding the Volcano's Message

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In a few respects, the aftermath of Mount St. Helens did not live up to its worst billing. Concern in May over immense crop failures under the mantle of ash has proved unfounded. There is a bumper crop in hops, and the apple harvests, while not at record levels, are bountiful. In and around Ritzville (pop. 2,000), 310 km (190 miles) from the mountain, wheatfields are yielding a third more bushels than last year. In some ways, the ash did more good than harm: its slight acidity helped neutralize the alkaline soil, and it let the ground retain water from heavy rains in May and June. Says Ritzville Farmer John Wellsandt, whose wheat yield jumped from last year's 40 or 45 bu. an acre to as high as 78: "It acted as a kind of sealer."

Radioactivity proved to be minimal, as did the toxicity of the ash. At first public health officials feared that the silica content of the fallout could cause lung damage, and the number of pulmonary cases did increase for a time in some areas. But later tests showed that while the ash has a high silica content, only a small percentage of the particles are of the type that causes scarring of the lungs.

Local residents think that another bumper crop—of littering tourists in their Winnebagos and charter buses—may be a mixed blessing. At Drew's Grocery in Toutle, 40 km (25 miles) from the blast site, a 40-page guest register (the third since June) is filled with names from around the world: West Germany, Switzerland, Japan, France, Yugoslavia, Brazil, the Ivory Coast, Saudi Arabia. Says Clerk Shelley Cooper, 23: "We're not used to having all these tourists around. They're kind of rude, stopping their cars in the middle of the road. They pay no attention to signs that say 'Keep Out.' "

But not everyone has reason to complain, especially local entrepreneurs. Since June, Drew's has sold 1,800 T shirts with slogans like HELENS IS HOT at $6 apiece. "Genuine Mount St. Helens Volcanic Ash" goes for 50¢ to $1.98 a bag. Says Cooper: "We started sacking it, and it just cracks us up when people come in asking for it."

With a scoop, of course, anyone can get plenty of ash for nothing from Drew's parking lot or just about any other horizontal or sloping surface around. So much ash blankets the state that some natives have covered over the w on their automobile license plates to create ASHINGTON. The stuff is omnipresent. It clogs air filters on farm machinery, shorts out electrical equipment, seeps into auto carburetors. Fire fighters slip on five to ten inches of it as they battle the four or five blazes a day that ignite in the stumps and slash piles of the no man's land left by the blast. Says Bob Joens of the Forest Service: "It's like walking on marbles."

Aided by a special congressional appropriation of $218 million, the U.S. Corps of Engineers is busily dredging the Toutle, Cowlitz and Columbia rivers, all clogged with tons of mud. So far, the Corps has removed 10.2 million cu. yds. of silt from the Cowlitz alone. The goal is to restore the river's water flow from 3,500 cu. ft. per second now to 50,000 by Nov. 1.