Eruption halted spring festival plans

Mount St. Helens Eruption 25 Year Anniversary 'I don't ever want to do it again'

MOSES LAKE — Faye Maslen was in preparation for what is now called the Moses Lake Spring Festival when Mount St. Helens blew its top in 1980.

One of her neighbors called Maslen that day to let her know the mountain had erupted, and ash began to fall soon after on the people of Grant County. The Moses Lake Spring Festival is still going strong 25 years later, but plans for that first festival were put on hold when much of the Columbia Basin found itself covered with inch upon inch of ash.

Maslen said 1:30 p.m. could have been midnight for many in Grant County that Sunday. The sun disappeared and a bright sky was replaced by clouds of falling ash.

"We went to bed that night, wondering if you're going to see daylight the next day," she said.

Maslen remembers the irrigation lines later running and spewing water along the streets of downtown. Those irrigation lines were placed along both Third Avenue and Broadway to help wash the ash away. Maslen said she also remembers the vacuum trucks that sucked up the ash, months after it first fell. Rain threatened the area about 10 days later, and Maslen said there was no place for the water to go with the storm drains already full of ash.

"It looked like we were in a snowstorm, except it didn't go away like a snowstorm did," she said of the ash.

Something else stuck out for Maslen in those days following the eruption: silence. No birds chirped in the days that followed; the only sounds to be heard were the sounds of snow shovels.

At first, no one knew whether the ash would be threatening to people's health.

"You didn't know if it was safe, if it was toxic," she said. "We didn't know."

While the ash didn't end up causing much harm to the health of humans, it did wreak havoc on motors. Maslen said car after car had its motor ruined after driving in the ash.

But in the aftermath of the eruption, Maslen said everyone in the area came together. Younger people cleaned the ash off the homes of senior citizens, and others with push brooms swept their way through downtown streets. Landscapes around Grant County changed following the eruption, and Maslen said ash would again pollute the air whenever a high wind blew in the years that followed.

"I think our city did a really good job of cleaning things out," she said.

The spring festival would have been the following weekend, and Maslen said organizers spent the next week on the phone contacting the many people involved. Anything planned for the summer, including the Moses Lake Spring Festival, Maslen said either didn't come off at all or didn't come off until late in the season.

"We all survived it," Maslen said, "But I don't want to ever do it again. And I don't know of anyone who does."