Remembering Mount St. Helens, 40 years later

RITZVILLE - For the 40th anniversary of the eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, The Journal asked readers about their memories of the event.

Individual stories merged like so many streams into one river of memories.

Kirk Danekas was serving as the newly-elected mayor here when the mountain blew.

"It blew all over the world, basically, but it happened to settle in Ritzville. We got the brunt of it," Danekas said. "The hardest part of the ordeal was Ritzville went from a city of roughly 2,000 people to suddenly having another 2,000 people stranded in town.

"They were staying in the schools, churches and in people's homes. That was the worse part of the whole thing, to get the people back on the road and get them home."

Danekas said the town was covered with 4.5-5 inches of ash.

"We had to take the firetrucks and block all the roads leading out of town," resident Dick Schoessler recalled. "No one could leave; they had to stay home. And it was very dark."

Local chiropractor Dr. Warren Kragt recalled being on the road coming into Ritzville when the mountain blew.

He was on the Spokane Falls Community College golf team, traveling to Tri-Cities for a match when, about 10 miles out of Ritzville, "we saw a rain cloud, and it started snowing ash.

"It got dark. It was black, in the middle of the day," Kragt recalled. "We had to turn back to Spokane, and it took us three hours. It was so dark we couldn't see."

Had they not turned around, they would have been stranded in Ritzville, he said.

"It was a good move, turning around. Spokane only got a skiff," Kragt said, adding he went to his parents home in Colfax to help shovel the sandy grit off the roof. He said his parents hosted 13 stranded people for five days.

Yvonne Hille recalled hosting people, too. She said her son, Joel, was returning home from a senior weekend when the car his dad built quit running, due to the ash.

"Joel started walking in the ditch, and had to walk backwards," Hille said. "A car stopped and asked if there was a town ahead. He said yes, in one mile, and asked for a ride. Being a stranger, they turned him down. Then two girls stopped and asked about a town, and he said he would show them if they gave him a ride. They brought him to the house, and they stayed until Tuesday or Wednesday with another family that stayed; a couple from Yakima with a five-year-old girl."

Ritzville Police Chief Dave McCormick, working as a jailer for Adams County Sheriff Ron Snowden at the time, recalled helping stranded guests.

"The incident put everyone in law enforcement into a state of emergency," McCormick said. "I remember the next morning, the sheriff released all the prisoners that he could; the misdemeanor non-violent ones, and we kept one or two.

"He (Snowden) assigned me to stay in contact with people staying in churches and the schools. I retrieved medication for people at the drugstore, and did grocery shopping for everyone. Everywhere people were staying, they needed food."

McCormick said deputies living in Lind and Washtucna were busy delivering food and medication to stranded people who lived outside the towns.

"There were two pharmacies in Ritzville at the time, and they were very busy," McCormick said.

A May 22, 1980, Ritzville Adams County Journal story titled "Unexpected visitors begin to leave," quoted Ritzville Drug owner Loren Schuoler saying his medical supplies were holding out, except the surgical masks.

People were buying them to protect their lungs from the ash. After the masks ran out, pharmacy staff began selling two handkerchiefs taped together as makeshift masks. A clerk in the store reported all the glass goggles and bandana scarves were sold out by mid-morning Monday, May 19, 1980.

Danekas recalled shelves being empty in the grocery store.

"It blew up on Sunday; the city went dark, and we got up the next morning with all that ash on the ground.

"I walked up town at 9 a.m, and, of course, everyone had been to the grocery store and hoarded the bread and all," Danekas said. "They didn't get the toilet paper like this pandemic. But most of the food was already taken out of the grocery store downtown."

He said he strolled over to the Pastime bar and pool hall.

"People were in there just dancing and drinking and having just a great time, not realizing they were going to be stuck in Ritzville," Danekas said. "So, that afternoon, everybody went back, whether it was to the church or the school, and they'd go in and get into arguments because someone was sitting in their spot. I had to shut the pool hall down for a couple days, just because people were drinking and getting in fights."

Danekas pointed out Ritzville was hosting not just stranded guests, but out-of-town workers.

"We had crews coming from all over," Danekas said. "We had to put them up in hotels and motels so they could stay and work."

Danekas said after most of the ash was picked up, they had to get it off the roofs.

"Once we finally got it all picked up, the local Fire Department came and hosed off every street. It was quite a community effort," Danekas said. "The hard part was, it was so fine when you tried to sweep it, it just flowed like a liquid, kind of. It wasn't just something that you could clean right up."

The May 22, 1980, Journal article quoted Adams County Sheriff Ron Snowden saying county and city road crews were unsure how to clear the fluffy ash because trying to remove it with snowplows was "like trying to move melted butter."

By Wednesday, according to The Journal, road crews were wetting down the ash with water, then scooping it up with the snow plows.

"People would put it in wheelbarrows, then into loaders, then into a gravel pit right next to town, and we filled that baby up," Danekas said. "If you look around, you can still see ash on the side of the road."

Danekas remembered a community cleanup at the city park, which had been shut down along with the golf course.

"People showed up with wheelbarrows and shovels. We must have had 200 people in the park, just scrubbing and cleaning up and loading up ash and hauling it out of there," Danekas said.

Hille also recalled what she called a "shovel out the park party."

"Community members gathered with shovels in hand," Hille said.

Danekas said after people were stranded for a few days, a station was set up at the Fire Department "so we could get the ash out of their carburetors so they could get going."

"Bruce Benzel was fire chief at the time, and Denny Atkinson was the rural fire chief," Danekas recalled. "We had air compressors and fire engines, and we washed all the cars down and cleaned out the carburetors, and they could actually leave. That took a long time."

"They had plowed the ash off the roads, but it was still very, very dusty," McCormick said. "When people wanted to leave, they would stop at the old fire station and people would blow out their air cleaners.

"Then they would get on the freeway ramp, and the sheriff would hold the cars and let them go one at a time, to let the dust clear from the air from the car in front of them, so it wouldn't flood their air cleaner and have their car quit or get in an accident from not being able to see in front of them."

"When it started, the natural instinct of people was to go outside and look up. And it got dark, pitch black," McCormick recalled. "The gritty stuff was the darkest, and almost black, and then it would lighten up and the particles became smaller as time went on."

The cleanup went on for a while. So, too, did the notoriety.

Danekas said he was on the roof of the school building with 15-20 other men when, "We got a call President Jimmy Carter was flying into Spokane and wanted to meet with local officials. We got off the roof and I drove to Sprague and picked up Mayor Don Pearson.

"We went in to see the president, and we met at the Fire Station at the airport," Danekas recalled. "We pulled in, and guys were out there with those little brooms cleaning up ash in the parking lot. Here, we've got 5 inches of ash, and they're sweeping it with a little broom.

"Ron Bair, the mayor of Spokane, put an alert out his people in Spokane needed to wear masks to protect them from all the ash. When we got there, we brought a sample of the ash we had, and he said, 'I don't think I should be talking to the president about the ash we had. We had just a little dusting compared to communities like Ritzville, Lind and Sprague.'"

Danekas continued: "It was a disaster, but once you got it cleaned up, we were back to normal life. We didn't lose rooftops. It was just a pain in the ass. But we got 'er done. We had a lot of great help from the community."

"The people here have been tremendous," Snowden told The Journal in 1980. "I just can't say enough..."

The No. 1 Cycle Bowling Team from Bremerton, had a bit to say about the community also. An editorial published in the May 22, 1980, Journal featured the group's mini-poem, "Motorists grateful:"

Mount St. Helens sure erupted.

And our lives were interrupted.

Stranded in this little town

Dust and ashes all around.

Ritzville folks were really cool

Gave us a home at Evergreen School.

We're grateful to you beyond measure,

For memories we'll always treasure.

Thank you suddenly seems so small.

So we'll just say, "We love you all!"