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You Show - A summative assessment
An excerpt from It Happened in Washington by James Crutchfield
Prior Knowledge: In May of 1980, the eruption of Mount St. Helens caused as much damage as Italy’s Mound Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Mount St Helens ejected at least one and a half cubic miles of lava and ash, destroying 150 square miles of timber in the process. In addition, alfalfa, wheat and other crops were destroyed for miles around the mountain, and nearly six thousand miles of roads in the region were covered with ash. The paragraphs below are an actual account of a man who experienced this event first- hand.
“It’s very hard to breath and very dark. If I could only breathe air. God, just give me a breath! I will try the radio. Mayday! Mayday! Ash is coming down on me heavily. It’s either dark or I am dead. God, I want to live!”
And miraculously, Crockett did live, rescued by helicopter hours later. But at the same time Crockett was filming at the base of Mount St. Helens, volcanologist David Johnston was five miles away observing the enlarged bulge that had appeared on the peak’s slope. It was 8:31 a.m. when the eruption occurred, and Johnston managed to get a single message off on hid radio before he was covered with ash and lava. “Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it!” were the last words the scientist uttered.
Moments later, in Spokane, Jean Penna was driving down the road from her apartment to her mother’s house when the sky became foreboding. Penna later said, “In the time it took me to get from my apartment to my mother’s house, it went black. All of a sudden this powder began to fall, just like snow. It was 75 degrees outside and pitch black… And in far-off Montana, a bewildered resident amid falling volcanic ash reported that he felt “like someone popped my eyeballs out and rolled them round in a sandbox.”
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