From the archive: Mount Baker shows no sign of reawakening

From the archive: This story was first published in The Bellingham Herald on Oct. 2, 2004.

While Mount St. Helens tosses and turns, Whatcom County’s Mount Baker appears to be deep in slumber.

But Mount Baker remains a potentially dangerous volcano that could threaten lives and property with debris flows, floods, and even explosive eruption someday, according to scientists who study the spectacular volcanic peaks of the North Cascades.

“We consider Baker within the category of ones that are definitely worth keeping an eye on,” said Tom Pierson, research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Wash.

Steve Malone, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network, said volcano scientists can only estimate odds of a major volcano event.

“Ultimately you don’t know,” Malone said. “Things can come right out of nowhere.”

But at present, Malone said, Baker appears to pose less risk than Mount Rainier or Mount Hood, because it is having fewer of the tiny earthquakes that are routine for every active volcano.

Volcano scientists have been eavesdropping on Mount Baker for nearly 30 years. In 1975 — five years before the disastrous Mount St. Helens eruption — scientists thought Mount Baker was the Northwest volcano most likely to blow. In that year, Baker began sending up big steam plumes, and scientists rushed to install monitoring equipment. The level of Baker Lake was lowered and people were ordered to stay out of the immediate area.

And then, nothing.

“It looked like something was going to happen, but it went back to sleep,” Pierson said.

Five years later, St. Helens got up on the wrong side of the bed.

In May 1980, after warning its neighbors with two months of moving and shaking, Mount St. Helens cut loose with a sudden sideways eruption, known to volcano scientists as a lateral blast, that killed 57 people and blew the top 1,300 feet of mountain into the air. The sound of the blast — but none of the ash and debris — reached as far as Whatcom County, 200 miles to the north, reminding county residents of the danger that could lurk in their own lovely landmark.

“No lateral blast of this magnitude has been recognized at Mount Baker,” a team of scientists wrote in a 1995 report on potential Mount Baker hazards. “But such blasts were not recognized before 1980 at Mount St. Helens, either.”

In that report, the scientists estimated that the potential zone of devastation of a similar-sized blast from Baker would extend about 15 miles from the summit of the mountain. Such a radius takes in the communities of Glacier and Van Zandt to the west and northwest, and the Skagit County community of Concrete to the south.

VISIT: U.S. Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory

An actual blast would not devastate that entire radius — just the area in the path of the blast, the report says.

The scariest scenario is a Baker eruption or debris flow that destroys Baker Dam and sends the waters of Baker Lake in a wall of water down the Skagit River, threatening all the Skagit County communities in its path.

But the Nooksack River through Whatcom County could also be affected by volcanic misbehavior. About 6,800 years ago, the scientific report says, a massive debris flow off the volcano’s slopes and into the Nooksack apparently roared all the way to the saltwater. Besides the immediate damage that such a flow could cause along the river, it would also raise the level of the river channel and make seasonal flooding much worse for many years to come, the report says.

Outside St. Helens’ blast zone, the biggest impact came from the tons of volcanic ash that diverted airline flights, irritated lungs and fouled engines. Mount Baker has produced some ash in past eruptions, but in comparatively small amounts, according to the 1995 report.

Most of the time winds out of the west and south would carry any Mount Baker ash away from Bellingham. But if winds were out of the east, and Baker spewed the same amount of ash as it did more than 550 years ago during its largest ash eruption, two inches of ash could be deposited on the city, the report says.

The odds of that are long, the scientists say, but they add that those odds are “still better than the odds of winning the lottery jackpot.”

Neil Clement, deputy director of the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office division of emergency management, said this county is part of a three-county volcano disaster plan that also includes Skagit and Snohomish counties. Snohomish County resources would be made available in Whatcom and Skagit counties in the event of a Baker disaster, and the two northern counties would help Snohomish if Glacier Peak erupted, Clement said.