Word: ashe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...family scrambled into a nearby shack, waited two hours and emerged to find themselves in a wasteland of ash and fallen trees. They started off to find their car, but the trail had been obliterated, and they had no idea where to look. So they pitched a tent and settled in for what turned out to be a 30-hour wait, munching on survival rations from their packs and sleeping on the ash. Around noon on Monday, an Air Force helicopter pilot spotted them. Said the pilot, Sgt. Earl Edwards: "The area they were in looked like somebody had dropped...
People exposed to the dust, even hundreds of miles away, suffered temporary discomfort: dry and itchy noses, throats and eyes. Reported a resident of Missoula: "I feel like someone popped my eyeballs out and rolled them around in a sandbox." But most of the ash particles were too large to lodge in human lungs and permanently scar them. Moreover, the dust did not stay in the air long enough to cause silicosis, which is a lung disease that miners, masonry workers, sandblasters and toilers in similar occupations get from breathing dust-laden air over long periods of time...
...earth and lowers temperatures. The cloud released by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia was so dense that it made 1816 in much of the U.S. "the year without a summer." Nothing comparable is likely to happen because of Mount St. Helens. Meteorologists estimate that its cloud of ash will reduce world temperatures by only a tiny fraction of a degree Fahrenheit-a deviation that will be too slight for people to notice...
Crops within three miles of the crater were destroyed. Downwind, in a triangular swath stretching 200 miles to the east, about 10% of the crops suffered some damage from the dust. Several fields of alfalfa and wheat in eastern Washington were flattened by the weight of ash. When wetted by rains, like those that fell four days after the blast, ash on the ground forms a thick cement-like glop that young shoots may be unable to break through...
...Idaho and Montana, and to Washington's abundant cherries and apples, is likely to be minor. Alfred Halvorson, a soil expert at Washington State University, believes farmers will lose no more crops than they would to a "very heavy dust storm." Some scientists feared at first that the ash might produce a devastating acid rain, but tests showed that the dust is about as acid as orange juice. The ash contains no more sulfur than ordinary rainwater does...