Mount St. Helens wasn't content with just destroying everything in its general vicinity. Nope. According to LiveScience, it was a second vertical blast following that initial horizontal one that flung all the ash and gas miles into the air. Over a period of a few days, St. Helens expelled 540 million tons of ash, which spread out across 2,200 miles, falling on a total of seven different states. In some places, it wasn't just a light sprinkling of ash, either. Authorities had to close interstate 90 from Seattle to Spokane for a week because of poor visibility. Airports shut down, too, some of them for as long as two weeks. More than 1,000 commercial flights out of the area were canceled, stranding travelers as the ash continued to rain down from the sky.
Once the ash settled, it got into air filters, electrical transformers, and oil systems. The ash caused short circuits in electrical transformers, leading to blackouts, so some communities didn't even have artificial light to help cut through the dark outside world. In Washington State, authorities had to remove 2.4 million cubic yards of ash from highways and airports. In Yakima alone, the costs of removal were around $2.2 million. And two people actually had heart attacks while trying to shovel the stuff. On the upside, ash is considered potentially useful, so 250,000 cubic yards of it were stockpiled after removal. You know, just in case.
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