May 18 · This Day in America
At 8:32 on a clear Sunday morning in Washington State, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake jolts loose the bulging north face of Mount St. Helens. The largest landslide in recorded history slides away — and the mountain, suddenly uncorked, fires sideways. A lateral blast races out at three hundred miles an hour, flattening old-growth forest like grass for nineteen miles. The summit drops thirteen hundred feet in minutes. Ash climbs fifteen miles into the sky and falls like gray snow across eleven states. Fifty-seven people die, among them the volcanologist David Johnston, who radioed "Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!" seconds before the blast reached his ridge. The eruption rewrote the science of volcanoes. And within a few short years, frogs and fireweed and elk returned to the blast zone, proving again that this continent does not stay broken for long.
Source: www.usgs.gov
Also on this day · 1933
In the New Deal's first hundred days, FDR signs the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, creating a single agency to remake an entire river basin — flood control, reforestation, and, above all, electric light for seven states of farmhouses that had never had it. It was an audacious idea: that the government could lift a whole region out of the dark. By 1934 it employed nine thousand people, and the lights came on.
Source: www.archives.gov
“Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!”Volcanologist David A. Johnston, final radio transmission, May 18, 1980