1980: Mt St Helen's and the Tides
In January 1974, I was introduced (as a college math and physics student) to the work of tidal expert Fegus J. Wood by articles in both Time and Newsweek magazines warning of Danger from High Tides. Wood explains that tides peak twice daily as we pass 'under' the moon so to speak, and they peak twice a month when the sun, moon and earth are all in on plane at new and full moons. These monthly peaks peak every seven months when the perigee coincides with the syzygy, a new or full moon. The highest possible peak would occur on January 3rd at the perihelion, our close approach to the sun each year. (Please see a video entitled The Shape of the Moon's Orbit .)Something that Wood said turned out to be useful to me research wise; he said that the storms appear to resonate and get worse at the second and third lunations after the initial peak. By 1980 I was able to apply Wood's model to inland storms, quakes and volcanic eruptions. The tides peaked in March in 1980, and the earthquakes began at Mt St Helen's soon after that. In April, the local NBC TV affiliate filmed an interview with me where I suggested that the mountain would erupt at the new moon May 14 or the new moon June 12th. The first three eruptions were May 18, May 25 and June 12. The image below is a screen capture from the perigee calculator page with the data for 1980, where we see that the perigee on March 16th was within an hour of the new moon. +1 means an hour after. -6 on Oct 23 means before the full moon (F).The tides peaked march 16th and Oct 23rd in 1980.
 1980 Data "On March 20, 1980, Mount St. Helen's experienced a magnitude 4.2 earthquake. Steam venting started on March 27. By the end of April, the north side of the mountain started to bulge. With little warning, a second earthquake of magnitude 5.1 May 18 triggered a massive collapse of the north face of the mountain." March 20 was 4 days after a new moon, as was May 18. What the quote fails to point out is that a 'red zone' had been established around the top of the mountain after it first started venting, but that the red zone had been opened up after a short time with no significant activity (as determined by someone using some standards).
* [Armed with this concept, I welcome you to watch the development of storm and volcanic activity, beginning at a tidal peak and through the following three months. Likewise, you can look for past events that followed tidal peaks.] In September 1979, Hurricane David struck the east coast while Fredrick hit Mobile Bay, here in Alabama. After filming the TV interview in April, I went to Gulf Shores to work, commuting back and forth to North Alabama most weekends. Actually several of us from up here went to the beach to work, as there wasn't much if it here that year. I had been framing since I got done with grad school.
 Gulf Shores June 10, 1980 Due to Hurricane Fredrick, new laws were enacted in Gulf Shores that required new construction to be 13 feet above the mean high tide, thus the telephone poles for supports. The building you see is several hundred feet off the beach (to the right). When Hurricane Allen came to shore in August, it flooded the area under the building (which is where I was sleeping at night), when the storm hit in Texas.
My 1981 Forecast
As a result of this, and the fact that we had been making accurate forecasts all that year, the local morning paper allowed me and a student of mine part of a page of the paper at the end of 1980, to do our review of 1981 (seen here in two scanned pages: 1,2). I will point out that I went over the stuff with the writer again and again, but she still wrote that the perigee is the moon's far point from the earth.
As to what happened at these times, we saw a snow storm in the NE US on Jan 4 and 5. In March Mt Aetna saw its worst eruption in 20 years, on the 23rd there was a 6.0r quake in Chile and a 5.8 on the 26th, a blizzard in the Rockies on the 27th, and President Reagan was shot on the 30th of March. There are tornadoes in the US on April 2-4. Hunger Striker Bobby Sands died at the tidal peak May 4th and Mobile, Alabama had 8 inches of rain. (Bob Marley died on the 11th, another hunger striker on the 12th, and Pope John Paul on the 13th of May.) December 13th, 1981 will stick in the minds of many Burnham-On-Sea residents forever. December 1981 contained some of the coldest, snowiest and severest winter weather ever recorded in the UK. The coldest December since 1890 and the snowiest since 1878, December 1981 with a CET of 0.3 was one of the severest winter months of the 20th Century. The night of the 12th/13th was exceptionally cold with minima of less than -20C was recorded in a few places with Shawbury recording -25.2C, the lowest minimum recorded during December since 1879.
 Anwar Sadat is shot on October 6th, when the sun conjoined Saturn. On July 28th, just before the Total Eclipse, there is a 7.3r quake in Iran. On October 15th there was a 7.2 quake in Chile as the sun conjoined Jupiter. There was a 7.0 quake in Santiago on November 8. On November 11 and 12 there were storms on both coasts of the US. On November 3rd, a late-season strom named Katrina was born, just as had happened in 1932. Compare the times of the tropical storms that year with our list. Note how Dennis (the worst storm that year) followed the peak by two months, as Mt St Helen's eruption did. The Alaskan volcano did the same thing this year.
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