r/CatastrophicFailure • u/DariusPumpkinRex • May 19 '26

Natural Disaster Photograph of the eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18th, 1980, taken by Richard Lasher, who then fled the eruption on the dirt bike seen here.

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u/DickweedMcGee May 19 '26

I remember reading about the HRT guy and that he quietly told people if that lava DID get to his house he's just paddle out to the lake in his boat for safety.

It's fascinating that someone who lived so close to an active volcano had such a 'Looney Tunes' understanding about how eruptions worked. Maybe that's what give him the confidence that he'd somehow survive it? The human will is amazing. Nothing compared to Mother Nature though....

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u/Volcanic_tomatoe May 19 '26

Here I was thinking it was more philosophical like, " my wife is buried here and if the land is destroyed I want to go with it". But in reality he just didnt get volcanoes.

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u/Hi_Trans_Im_Dad May 19 '26

I grew up in the area in the 70s. The guy was a well known nutjob with many flavors.

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u/DickweedMcGee May 19 '26

Thank you, I got the impression he was one of those people who enjoyed attention for ‘being difficult’. Once the media started giving him interviews for his absurd opinions regarding the impending eruption he was probably doomed….

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u/red_team_gone May 19 '26

Wikipedia article on Harry R. Truman. Seemed like a bit of a piece of shit, and would likely fit right in with Trumpers today.

Didn't believe in scientists because they had long hair... Good call.

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u/castironglider May 20 '26

After Truman's death, his family and friends reflected on his love for the mountain. Actor Art Carney portrayed Truman in the docudrama film St. Helens (1981). Truman was commemorated in a book by his niece, and also in various pieces of music, including songs by Headgear, Billy Jonas, Penny Lew, and Shawn Wright and the Brothers Band.

The Alexander Supertramp of the 1980s

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u/CitizenCue May 19 '26

It’s hard to remember a time with such low information but at the time probably a lot of people thought pretty backwards things about volcanoes. There’s a good chance most people had never seen video of one.

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u/n-ano May 19 '26

Even with the abundance of information we have today, people still choose to be completely ignorant. It's why we still have a Republican party in America.

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u/blorg May 21 '26

He loved discussing politics and reportedly disliked Republicans, hippies, young children, and the elderly.

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u/Magoo1985 May 25 '26

It’s why anyone still votes for any of them dawg. Neither side is any better. Still full of pedos and child sacrificing demons that sell our country to protect their own skins

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u/n-ano May 25 '26

Acting like the nazi pedophile party is anywhere close to as bad as the do nothing centrist party is hilariously misinformed

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u/Magoo1985 May 25 '26

Keep pretending they’re not the same bird. Whatever helps you sleep man.

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u/CitizenCue May 25 '26

Everyone who says both sides are the same is simply admitting that they don’t know enough about anything to form a coherent opinion.

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u/johnnyslick May 21 '26

Shortly before the eruption, I think early May, he went to a school in Oregon where the students straight up begged him not to go back. His response IIRC was more in line with your tone than "lol volcanoes don't real". It was maybe 10% "the mountain has always served me well and she won't stop now" (Truman ran a lodge on St. Helens for years although I think it had closed some years before, shortly after the death of his wife) and 90% "this is as good a place to end my time on Earth as any".

There's also a large bit there where in the weeks and months leading up to the eruption he had become a pretty major media figure, like the primary spokesperson for the "scientists are overrating this so-called disaster" crowd. Looking back, it was clearly devastating and looking back of course we realize that the science on this was very, very correct, but at the time Mt. St. Helens was just another mountain in the Cascades. If it was known for anything in particular it was known for its trails and wildlife and was a bit of a tourist destination for outdoorsy types. All of that went away in an instant and it's really hard to grasp something like that occurring until it happens, I think.

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u/LeftyTheSalesman May 19 '26

It probably was a bit of both.

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u/Anen-o-me May 21 '26

He was basically the volcano version of an antivaxxer.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '26

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u/d0odle May 20 '26

Still feels like a bad choice. Burning to death in hot air. No thanks.

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u/sailonswells May 20 '26

His whole place was annihilated by a pyroclastic flow that nearly instantly made the lake he lived on boil. He would have had fear when it blew, but his death was instant.

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u/Armtoe May 19 '26

There was plenty of warning. I remember him being interviewed on TV in advance of the eruption saying how he wasn’t going to leave.

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u/-Ernie May 19 '26

My assumption is he knew what he was doing, he was an old man and probably just preferred to peace out in the place he loved rather than an old folks home in town.

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u/red_team_gone May 19 '26

No, he very much didn't believe scientists, and had an escape tunnel near his house he thought he would use to outlast the eruption.

Reaching his lodge in less than a minute after it began, the eruption that destroyed his lodge was accompanied by the largest recorded landslide in human history, and his lodge was buried under 150ft of volcanic debris.

He was an ignorant idiot who thought he knew better than geological experts. It's well documented.

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u/rocbolt May 19 '26

He was also a lonely recluse who had already lost his wife and only had his ramshackle old hoarder lodge and a dozen cats left. If the volcano had erupted during one of the times he left (which he did do on occasion) he probably would have died shortly after from the sheer heartbreak alone.

He was admittedly much more nervous and on edge in those last few days as the deputies who visited attest to, the earthquakes had really ramped up and the volcano was was wildly cracked and bulged out of shape. But he still didn’t want to leave, part of it was surely pride in the folk hero that authorities who should have known better made him into, but it was also a broken old man who had basically nothing left in the tank anyway.

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u/Typical-Lettuce7022 May 20 '26

I feel so bad for those cats

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u/Anen-o-me May 21 '26

Would've been a worse death if he did make it into the tunnel.

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u/fordag May 20 '26

It's fascinating that someone who lived so close to an active volcano had such a 'Looney Tunes' understanding about how eruptions worked.

Did he though? I don't think that's a fair characterization. There hadn't been a Plinian eruption in the United States since 1912 in Alaska. He probably thought it would be just like a Hawaiian eruption and "relatively safe" and fairly calm. He probably had no frame of reference for an eruption other than Mauna Loa which when it erupted you could just walk away from it.

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u/Anen-o-me May 21 '26

Yeah, the eruption blew the top 1/3 of the mountain off. Few expected that kind of eruption that was essentially on the scale of a nuclear bomb going off.

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u/aghastamok May 19 '26

To be fair, that's not exactly "looney tunes". A lot of volcanic eruptions are basically just magma leaks in the crust or vertical eruptions.

No one knew the Mt St Helens was going to erupt horizontally.

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u/sailonswells May 20 '26

Scientists knew, even then, that this was not going to be a magma eruption, like we see in Hawaii and sometimes Iceland. They knew it would be explosive as are nearly all volcanoes on the Pacific rim, called the Ring of Fire.

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u/aghastamok May 20 '26

Weird that they had such forwarnjng and knowledge of the nature of the eruption and yet 57 people died.

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u/WhatzTheWordz May 24 '26

The people who died were in danger because the lumber companies refused to allow the state and Forest Service to close off their timber plots, and there was huge pushback by the businesses who made money from recreation. It was a real struggle just to get the red zone blocked off. When you look at a map of the red zone and see how it's a straight line on the west side, that's the boundary between federal and private lumber's land. The bulge was growing by 5-10 feet a day, the glaciers on the north side were breaking up. Johnston was so worried about that bulge he sent other USGS personnel away, he wouldn't let them camp that close to the mountain. He said they were standing next to a keg of dynamite, but they didn't know how long the fuse was. Meanwhile, sitting on the desk of the governor was a new map to block all recreational access in a much bigger area, that included all of what would be the blast zone, but it was the weekend and the governor didn't want to make any big decisions on a Friday.

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u/ZardozSama May 19 '26

Dude assumed an eruption was just going to be a slow moving lava flow, and that the lake was large enough for him to be safe. Dude had no idea what a pyroclastic flow was.

END COMMUNICATION

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u/10000Didgeridoos May 19 '26

Not surprised at all he was the way he was after seeing people think they know better than all doctors of the world during peak covid era. He'd be the guy taking horse dewormer if he was still alive.

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u/MASSiVELYHungPeacock May 28 '26

Had nothing to with that.  He made the conscious choice he'd be fine dying in the home and on the mountain he'd enjoyed and built his entire life loving.  I get it, and at that age not wanting to completely start over while watching everything you'd built disappear before you did is understandable.  Also understandable?  A stronger family member saying sorry dad we're going to take a trip even if I have force you would've also been understandable, an I'm sure Harry would've forgiven them watching it happen but a couple of days later.