Word: snow
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...destruction in the Cascades "Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it!" The frantic warning was radioed at precisely 8:31 a.m. on that fateful Sunday by Volcano Expert David Johnston, 30, who had climbed to a monitoring site five miles from Washington State's Mount St. Helens in the snow-capped Cascade Range, 40 miles northeast of Portland, Ore. He wanted to peer through binoculars at an ominous bulge building up below the crater, which had been rumbling and steaming for eight weeks, and report his observations to the U.S. Geological Survey center in Vancouver, Wash...
Clouds of hot ash made up of pulverized rock were belched twelve miles into the sky. Giant mud slides, composed of melted snow mixed with ash and propelled by waves of superheated gas erupting out of the crater, rumbled down the slopes Hiroshima, crashed through valleys, leaving millions of trees knocked down in rows, as though a giant had been playing pick-up sticks...
...winds carried the eruption's debris northeast from the shattered mountain, thick layers of ash, looking like dirty snow, fell on eastern Washington. Yakima, a town of 50,000 located 85 miles east of the volcano, experienced midnight at noon. The mining and ranching communities of the Idaho panhandle and western Montana turned into ghostly towns in which nobody could move about the dust-choked streets without surgical masks or some substitute: handkerchiefs, bandanas, even coffee filters strapped over nose and mouth with rubber bands. Schools, factories and most stores and offices closed. Highways were closed and airports were...
...decided to stop first at her mother's home a few blocks from her own. Said she: "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." When she left her apartment complex, she said, several of her friends were sunbathing. "You've got people out there sunbathing," she marveled, "and the sky starts falling...
...Street, Mrs. Erma Miller's once meticulously landscaped ranch-style house looked as if it were in a desert. The lawn had disappeared almost completely. Branches were broken from two formerly flowering hawthornes. There was a 4-ft. drift on the patio. Said Mrs. Miller, leaning on her snow shovel: 'You ought to see the inside. You can't keep the dust out.' "Within hours of the storm, 2,500 stranded motorists sought refuge in Ritzville. Schools and churches were turned into shelters; 81 people slept on the floor of Perkins Restaurant, and many families took...