Mount St. Helens: 25 Years of Bitter Memories

MOUNT ST. HELENS NATIONAL MONUMENT, Wash. (AP) -- The four, their lungs filled with ash, were found inside their car after Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980, with the force of a hydrogen bomb.

Rescuers also discovered a cassette recorded by Ron and Barbara Seibold's children, ages 7 and 9, as the family drove toward the volcano.

"They were goofing around -- asking whether or not they would see lava coming out of the mountain,'' said Jim Thomas, an emergency worker at the time. "One asked if it was dangerous, and both parents cheerfully reassured their kids that they'd be safe.''

They weren't.

Like the Seibolds, most of the volcano's 57 victims were caught in the avalanche of boiling mud and ash in sections of the mountain considered safe for camping and recreation. Most died of suffocation as ash filled their throats, noses and lungs.

Twenty-five years after the fatal eruption, victims' families want to stress that their loved ones did not die because of their own recklessness.

"My mother would never ever, ever, ever, ever have killed her own daughter,'' said Roxann Edwards, of Scio, Ore., who was 18 when her mother and sister set off for a day trip to the mountain. Their bodies were found in the branches of separate hemlock trees, about four miles outside the restricted zones.

On television the day after the eruption, then-Gov. Dixie Lee Ray said most of the victims had ignored official warnings and deliberately went into harm's way. President Carter echoed that comment, saying: "One of the reasons for the loss of life that has occurred is that tourists and other interested people, curious people, refused to comply with the directives issued by the governor.''

On Monday, victims' families asked for an apology from Gov. Christine Gregoire on behalf of the late Gov. Ray.

Gregoire said she has no firsthand knowledge of the decisions from that time, but added there has been much progress in preparing for natural disasters.

"I hope it is some consolation to their families that the knowledge we've acquired will help us avoid further tragedy,'' she said in a prepared statement.

In the weeks leading up to the eruption, tourists were routinely trying to get by roadblocks, said Bob Landon, former chief of the Washington State Patrol. But when the bodies were finally recovered, it became clear that only a handful had died within the off-limits area, he said.

Of the 57 who died on the mountain, only three are known to have been killed within the "red zone,'' the area cordoned off by officials before the eruption. Another three -- all miners carrying permits -- died in the adjacent "blue zone,'' an area closed to the general public but open to permit-carrying workers.

Washington state officials argued that the blast was unprecedented and that there was no way for them to have foreseen the scale of the disaster, which ripped trees out of the ground 17 miles from the crater and devastated an area spanning 230 square miles. Within hours, its plume had blocked the sun over much of eastern Washington. Ash fell like snow as far away as Montana.

The possibility of a far larger eruption had been discussed, but it stayed among scientists, said Richard Waitt, a geologist at the USGS's Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver.

"We all have blood on our hands, if you want to look at it that way,'' said Waitt, who was one of a handful of scientists who had tried to warn his superiors that the blast area could be far larger than originally imagined. But even if scientists had predicted the true scope of the catastrophe, Waitt said, it's unlikely the state could have restricted access because much of the blast site was on private property.

The red zone was almost entirely within the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. It ended where the landholdings of timber giant, Weyerhaeuser Co., began, Waitt said.

That became the basis for a lawsuit brought by the victims' families, who alleged that the restricted areas were based on property lines, not science. The case against the state was dismissed in 1985, after the court ruled that state officials did not know how destructive the eruption was going to be. Some families sued Weyerhaeuser, settling for a reported $225,000 -- an amount that many said was a pittance.

"No one brings their kids to a place they consider unsafe,'' said Donna Parker, whose brother had been camping nearly three miles outside the restricted zones when the volcano erupted. When Parker made it to the site of her brother's death, she found that the eggs inside his cooler had been hard-boiled by the heat.

"And this was supposed to be a safe place?'' said Parker, 66. "The state owes us an apology.''

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