Were you anywhere near it when it blew? If there is a major earthquake in the area then there might be a problem with the lake. What's the best way to work that out:
I visited the area a few months later with my then-girlfriend. There were still drifts of beige ash all along the roads, including I-5, which is about 20mi west of St Helens. You couldn't get near the mountain, but you could see the massive area of blown-down trees from the road that runs east-west about 10mi north of the mountain. Rainier is a far bigger threat. It has a history of releasing lahars to the north, where hundreds of thousands of people now reside.
I'm convinced that the eruption of Mount St. Helens played a role in the summer of 1980 being an agonizing and dangerously hot one in the United States. It was so hot that the murder rate in Kansas City actually went DOWN! Contrary to how murder rates tend to rise the hotter the weather is apparently it was so hot that people could not get out and violently confront each other.
