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Air Force and Army National Guard helicopters lifted 130 survivors to safety. Officials doubted that this count would go up; the last person found alive on the mountain was flown out on Tuesday. By Red Cross count, mud slides destroyed 123 homes in the town of Toutle and its surrounding area, along with bridges, roads and all other signs of human habitation.
The eruption of Mount St. Helens, which began in a minor way on March 27, was the first in the continental U.S. since the Cascades' Mount Lassen, 400 miles to the south, spit up a shower of mud and stones in 1914. Had last week's explosion occurred in a heavily populated area, the loss of life would have been awesome. Geologists estimated that St. Helens spewed out about 1.5 cubic miles of debris, a blast on about the same order of magnitude as the one in A.D. 79 from Italy's Vesuvius, which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum with ash and mud.
As it was, the eruption blew down 150 sq. mi. of timber worth about $200 million, caused an estimated $222 million in damage to wheat, alfalfa and other crops as far east as Missoula, Mont., and buried 5,900 miles of roads under ash. Clearing them could cost another $200 million. The blast created a 20-mile log jam along the Columbia River that blocked shipping between Longview, Wash., and Astoria, Ore. Volcanic mud carried by the river choked the harbor of Portland. Officials estimated that the ports would lose $5 million a day until dredges could clear a new channel through the silt, which in some places reduced the depth of the harbor from 40 ft. to 14 ft. Not all the long-range effects of the blast, particularly to the region's ecological balance, can yet be calculated. For example, the eruption killed a million fingerlings (baby fish) in a hatchery at Toutle, and there were fears that ash on the leaves of plants would interfere with photosynthesis, the process by which plants turn sunlight into nutrients.
As winds carried the eruption's debris northeast from the shattered mountain, thick layers of ash, looking like dirty snow, fell on eastern Washington. Yakima, a town of 50,000 located 85 miles east of the volcano, experienced midnight at noon. The mining and ranching communities of the Idaho panhandle and western Montana turned into ghostly towns in which nobody could move about the dust-choked streets without surgical masks or some substitute: handkerchiefs, bandanas, even coffee filters strapped over nose and mouth with rubber bands. Schools, factories and most stores and offices closed. Highways were closed and airports were shut down because of near zero visibility, stranding thousands of frightened travelers. Mail deliveries were halted. Electricity was curtailed until workers could clean ash from generators.
Closer to the mountain, the eruption blasted twelve miles of the once pristine north fork of the Toutle River into a lifeless moonscape. Herds of black-tailed deer, bobcats and cougars used to swarm through the valley's hemlock and Douglas fir; elk still wandered in hopeless confusion through the ashen desolation. The river and its source, Spirit Lake, once teemed with steelhead trout and Chinook salmon. All were destroyed by the eruption. TIME Correspondent Paul Witteman was one of the first journalists to see the area by helicopter after the blast. His report: