We were sitting on our motorcycles in a Pacific Northwest valley on a Sunday morning in May 1980, looking out across the ridges like a couple of underemployed deities surveying a kingdom we did not own. My buddy and I heard a boom rolling across the country and figured somebody down the road had cracked open a stick of dynamite and a beer and was having the kind of morning we all wanted to have. We laughed. We gunned the engines. We rode another hour through mud the color of old coffee.
We came home soaked. Tired. Mud caked from helmet to boot. We walked through the door and into a country that no longer existed.
The television was on. Plumes of ash were climbing miles into the sky over a mountain that no longer had a top. My grandparents had been running from mudflows. Family members nowhere near the blast zone had walked out of their kitchens and watched their houses become geography. The phones were ringing in a register I had never heard before, the register of people who had just learned that the world is not a fixed thing, that the ground you walk on is renting from forces that can call in the lease any Sunday morning they choose.
That was Mount St. Helens. May 18, 1980. Forty six years ago this morning.
What the mountain took
The boom we did not recognize traveled hundreds of miles. The ash circled the planet in about two weeks and fell in measurable quantities across eleven states. The Toutle and Cowlitz ran with mud and dead timber and the corpses of every living thing the rivers had previously kept alive. Spirit Lake disappeared and rebuilt itself as a different lake on a different floor at a different elevation, because that is what mountains do when they decide they are not finished. Fifty seven people died. One of them was David Johnston, the USGS volcanologist who keyed his radio and said “Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!” and was never heard from again.
My family wandered around for weeks like people who had been hit in the head with a board. Some of them never quite came back from it. The ones who had run from the mud kept running in their sleep for years. The ones who had lost houses learned what it meant to have a roof and walls and a kitchen one Saturday and to have a crater and a story the next. The cousins. The aunts. The uncles. The people who married into the mess and inherited it. The whole western half of the family carried that morning around for the rest of their lives like a coin in the pocket they would touch when they thought nobody was looking.
That is the thing nobody tells you about a volcano. The mountain heals. The ground heals. The forest comes back in a stranger and more interesting shape than it had before. The people who lived through it carry the morning forever and they bring it with them into rooms where nobody else can see it.
What the country built afterward
But here is the thing. After the mountain killed Johnston and the rivers and fifty six other people and quietly ruined the rest of us, the country did something. The country, in its bumbling, contradictory, often stupid way, looked at the smoking hole in Washington State and said yeah, okay, we should probably have somebody watching the rest of these.
So we built it. Or we finished building what we had started.
Congress had already made USGS the lead federal agency for volcanic hazard warnings under 1974 legislation. After May 18, USGS opened a permanent regional office in Vancouver, Washington, and named the building for David Johnston, because that is what a country with any sense does. The Cascades Volcano Observatory holds about sixty scientists, technicians, and engineers right now, today, this morning. They watch Rainier and Hood and Baker and Glacier Peak and St. Helens itself and a list of other mountains rated very high threat potential. The Volcano Disaster Assistance Program runs out of the same building, which means when a mountain anywhere in the world starts breathing funny and the host country picks up a phone, the people who answer it work in that office in Vancouver. That is a real thing that exists right now. Or that existed last week. Check back tomorrow.
FEMA was barely a year old in May 1980 and fumbled the response in ways that became case studies in how not to do it, the kind of case studies that show up in graduate seminars taught by exhausted men in their sixties who have seen what bad coordination costs in body bags. The Stafford Act passed in 1988 and built the framework that ran federal disaster response for the next thirty seven years. The lessons of St. Helens were baked into it. The interagency coordination doctrine that runs major disasters in this country traces back, in part, to the morning my grandparents were running from mud and the morning my cousins watched their houses fill up with the river.
You can draw a straight line from the mountain to a national apparatus for handling catastrophe that worked, mostly, for forty five years. Imperfect. Bureaucratic. Slow when it should have been fast. But there. Funded. Staffed. Run by people who knew how to pick up a phone.
Have we forgotten
So have we forgotten any of this?
Not the mountain. The mountain is iconic. Tourists drive up to Johnston Ridge and read the placards and snap photos and buy a refrigerator magnet and drive home thinking about how interesting it all was. The footage of the lateral blast plays on documentaries narrated by men with British accents who say “extraordinary” a lot.
What we forgot is the why. We forgot why we built the apparatus. We forgot that when Rainier wakes up the only reason it will not kill thousands is because somebody is watching it and will see the wake up and pick up the phone. We forgot that the Toutle has not buried the Columbia shipping channel because the Army Corps built a sediment dam on the North Fork in 1989 and somebody is still operating it. We forgot that the system absorbed the lesson so well that the lesson stopped feeling urgent. We forgot that the only reason your last natural disaster was not worse than it was is because of people in offices you have never heard of, in cities you have never been to, doing jobs you cannot describe.
The forgetting is the precondition. It is the soft pillow shaped reason that what is happening now is allowed to happen.
What they are doing to the watchtower
What is happening now is the systematic dismantling of the apparatus that the mountain built. And I do mean systematic. This is not accident. This is not budget pressure. This is people walking into federal buildings with laptops and a mandate to break things, and breaking them.
The Department of Government Efficiency. There is no agency name in the history of the republic that has carried a heavier load of irony than this one. It arrived at FEMA, USGS, NOAA, and DOI in early 2025 and treated these agencies the way a private equity firm treats a portfolio company in its third year of underperformance. Cut headcount. Cut budget. Move the bodies. Worry about the consequences when somebody is in the consequences.
Here is the carnage.
FEMA lost roughly twenty percent of its staff by mid 2025. Two thousand people walked out the door with buyouts. The acting administrator told Congress that eliminating FEMA was a bad idea, and DHS fired him for the heresy of being correct in public. His replacement wrote an internal memo concluding that FEMA was not ready for the 2025 hurricane season, citing staffing, contracts, and the demoralization of a workforce that had been told by their own government that they were the problem. Sixteen senior executives walked out in a single week in May.
The president said in June 2025 that he wanted to phase FEMA out after the November hurricane season ended, on the theory that governors should handle it themselves because, and I am quoting, “if they can’t handle it, the aftermath, then maybe they shouldn’t be governor.” A sentence so spectacularly stupid that it deserves to be carved on a stone tablet and dropped into the Marianas Trench.
USGS lost 240 people at the Department of the Interior in February 2025. The workers who maintain ten thousand stream gauges that warn American towns about floods could not buy parts at the local hardware store because purchase cards had been capped at one dollar under a spending freeze. One dollar. That is what they thought volcano and flood monitoring was worth at the petty cash level. Senior leaders at Interior who raised concerns about DOGE access to federal payment systems were placed on administrative leave for the crime of doing their jobs. A DOGE representative was given authority over the bureaus to lead consolidation, which is government speak for breaking the furniture and selling the pieces back to the people who paid for them.
NOAA lost eight hundred positions early in 2025. The DOGE team that arrived in February demanded access to mission critical databases and announced plans to cut half the personnel and a third of the budget. The 2026 budget proposes a forty percent funding cut and eliminates the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, the weather laboratories, and the cooperative institutes that supply forecast research from eighty universities. Gone. Erased. Filed under climate change adjacent and therefore expendable, as if hurricanes have political opinions, as if a tornado checks your voter registration before flattening your barn.
And then there is the detail that will not leave me alone. In July 2025, in Kerr County, Texas, a flash flood killed dozens of people including children at summer camps. The Austin San Antonio NWS office had a vacant warning coordination meteorologist position. That role exists because somebody, after some other flood, after some other dead, learned that the science means nothing if the warning never reaches the people who can act on it. That role was a lesson learned in blood and it was empty when the next flood came and now there are more dead children and the people who took the job out of the org chart are still walking around being applauded as efficient.
Sit with that for a minute. Sit with the children.
DHS forgot what it was for
There is a deeper rot underneath the inventory of cuts and it has a name. The Department of Homeland Security was sold to the American public after September 11 as a counterterrorism agency. The mission, as advertised, was to keep the homeland from being attacked by foreign enemies. FEMA was folded into DHS in 2003. The Coast Guard was folded in. A basket of other agencies got folded in on the theory that catastrophe response and border control and aviation security and disease readiness all belonged under one roof because they all dealt with the things that could ruin a Tuesday morning in a major American city.
That was the pitch. The pitch has changed.
DHS in 2025 stopped pretending to be a counterterrorism agency. It is a domestic enforcement apparatus now. It is a deportation machine. Masked agents pull people out of immigration courthouses where they came because they were told to come. American citizens get detained by mistake and held for days before lawyers can find them. The people who run the agency have stopped trying to disguise the mission. They say it out loud, on Fox News, in press releases, on signs hung in conference rooms with eagles and chains on them.
The agencies that were supposed to save lives have been redirected to take lives apart.
In August 2025, DHS forcibly reassigned about a hundred FEMA employees to ICE. Half of FEMA’s human resources department. Fifty people from the security team. The emails went out on August 5 with a subject line that read “Management Directed Reassignment.” Recipients had seven calendar days to accept or be removed from federal service. The official justification was that ICE was trying to hire 10,000 new deportation officers and needed help with vetting paperwork. The unofficial reality was that an agency built to find your grandmother in the rubble was being told to find your gardener in his apartment.
DHS also moved $608 million in FEMA grant money to states for the construction and expansion of migrant detention centers, including Alligator Alcatraz, a facility in the Florida Everglades that is exactly as humane as the name suggests. The Trump administration tried to bar states from receiving FEMA disaster aid if they had laws requiring boycotts of Israeli firms, walked it back after the outcry, and reserved the right to enforce the restriction in the future.
And the FEMA contracts that survived the cuts did not survive the Secretary’s office. Noem signed a policy requiring her personal approval for every FEMA expenditure over $100,000. As of September 2025, that policy had stalled 1,034 contracts, grants, and disaster awards. The delays included funding for the survivors of the Kerr County flood that killed children at summer camps, and survivors of Hurricane Helene who were still trying to rebuild from the previous year. The Secretary in charge of disaster response was personally bottlenecking the disaster response from a house she had taken from an admiral.
The Coast Guard got hit too. The Coast Guard. The service whose founding mission, going back to Alexander Hamilton, is helping people who are in trouble on the water. The service that pulled 169 people out of the floodwaters in Kerr County in July 2025. The service whose rescue swimmers jump out of helicopters into hurricanes to save strangers they will never meet again.
That service tripled its operational deployment to the southern border and the maritime approaches, by the administration’s own statements. They launched Operation River Wall to patrol 260 miles of the Rio Grande, a freshwater river that the United States Coast Guard, a maritime service, was now policing because somebody in Washington thought a cutter in the desert would play well in a press release. They launched Operation Pacific Viper to interdict drugs and what the official press releases call illegal aliens before they reach American shores.
The Coast Guard broke its own all time record for drug interdictions in 2025, while the women and men who actually run the cutters watched their crews get stretched into the kind of mission creep that ends with somebody making a mistake nobody wants to read about in the morning.
A Coast Guard is a humanitarian service. You can pin all the law enforcement authorities you want onto it. You can paint counter narco stripes on the cutters and run boarding teams in the Pacific until the steel rivets shake loose. But the service is a humanitarian service at its core. It exists to save the lives of strangers on the water. Repurposing it as the maritime arm of a deportation campaign is a category error so profound that it should not survive contact with any honest person who has ever been in trouble offshore.
And then there is Quarters 1.
Quarters 1 is the official residence of the Commandant of the United States Coast Guard. It is a waterfront house on Joint Base Anacostia Bolling in Washington, D.C. It is the house in which the senior officer of one of the five armed services of the United States lives, so that the senior officer can be reached at any hour of the day or night when an oil tanker capsizes or a fishing boat goes down or a hurricane drives a city into the surf.
On January 21, 2025, one day after his inauguration, the president fired Admiral Linda Fagan, the first woman ever to lead the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard had given her a sixty day waiver to find new housing, the standard professional courtesy extended to a flag officer leaving a service residence. The administration overrode the Coast Guard’s own decision and put her on the curb in three hours. Three. Hours.
Kristi Noem moved into Quarters 1 in August 2025. Rent free, according to The Washington Post. No DHS Secretary in the history of DHS had ever lived in that residence. The Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State, when they live in service housing, pay rent. Hegseth pays $4,600 a month for his place at Fort McNair. Pompeo paid rent during the first Trump term. The custom is that cabinet officers who occupy military residences cut a check. Noem did not. The DHS spokesperson said she was there because of security threats and continues to pay rent on her Navy Yard apartment, which she does not occupy. A house she sleeps in for free, and a house she pays for that sits empty, and no admiral in the official residence of the senior officer of the service she runs.
The president fired Noem as DHS Secretary on March 5, 2026.
On April 23, 2026, the Wall Street Journal reported that the former DHS Secretary, fired more than seven weeks earlier, was still living in Quarters 1. The current Commandant, Admiral Lunday, was living next door in the Vice Commandant’s quarters because his own house was still occupied by the political appointee who took it from the woman who lived there before, who has herself now been fired, and who has not packed her bags. On May 1, House Oversight Democrats sent a letter demanding her departure and an accounting of any rent paid. She is, as of this writing, still there.
If you cannot read the symbolism on that one, I cannot help you. The agency that is supposed to defend the homeland kicked the first woman to lead the Coast Guard out of her house in three hours, replaced her with a political appointee who took the keys and refused to pay rent, and continues to occupy the bedroom of the senior officer of the service after being fired herself. The service members sleep in the lesser house. The fired civilian sleeps in the bigger one. This is the federal government as feudal arrangement, with the cabinet officer as squatter baron and the admirals as the help.
A strange year to be doing this
The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1, two weeks from now. NOAA has issued an El Niño Watch. The La Niña we just came out of ended in early spring. Conditions are transitioning toward El Niño with an 82 percent probability of emergence by July. The transition is happening across the hurricane season itself, which is a thing forecasters hate because it makes the season unusually hard to predict. El Niño normally suppresses Atlantic hurricane activity by chewing up storm tops with wind shear. But sea surface temperatures are running above normal nearly everywhere, the spring predictability barrier means forecasts will be soft until July, and the agency responsible for the forecast is bleeding personnel, fighting a proposed forty percent budget cut, and running on whatever staff has not yet walked out the door.
It is a strange year to be gutting the only federal organism in the country capable of telling you that the water is coming.
What government actually is
I do not think government should be a business. I do not think it should make profits. I do not think it should provide a feeding trough for people who already have feeding troughs.
Government is the thing we build together for the common good. It is the thing that does what no individual and no private firm can do, which is absorb catastrophic risk on behalf of strangers who cannot pay for the service in advance because they do not yet know they are going to need it. A volcano does not ask if you have a subscription. A river does not run a credit check before it climbs out of its banks. A hurricane is not interested in your loyalty program.
We have spent decades, under administrations of both parties, trying to run the government like a business. The theory is that anything not profitable must be wasteful. The trouble with the theory is that almost nothing government should do is profitable, and that is the whole point. The Volcano Disaster Assistance Program is not profitable. The warning coordination meteorologist who knows the emergency managers personally and can pick up the phone at three in the morning is not profitable. The stream gauge on a river in rural Vermont that gives a small town two hours of warning before the water arrives is not profitable. These things are not profitable. They are necessary. And a society that confuses the two will eventually find out, in a way that involves graves, which it actually was.
The compassion that pulled my grandparents out of the mud in 1980 was not a federal program. It was neighbors. The federal apparatus that grew out of the response was an attempt to scale that neighborly impulse to a country too big for neighbors alone. To buy us a watchtower. To buy us a phone tree. To buy us a man on a ridgeline who would key the radio and say Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!
That apparatus is being dismantled right now by people who do not appear to know what they are dismantling, or who know and do not care, or who believe that the dismantling itself is the point. The pieces that survive the dismantling are being repurposed to enforce, not to save. The lifesavers have been told to be the cops. The cops have been told that the country is theirs to discipline.
I am not pretending to be neutral on this one. My family carried that morning around for the rest of their lives. Some of them did not get to die in peace because of it. I will not stand here on the forty sixth anniversary of the day the mountain killed pieces of my family and watch the same country that built the watchtower in their memory hand the watchtower to a man with a chainsaw and a slide deck and a friend in real estate.
If the mountain pops tomorrow
If a Cascade volcano started moving tomorrow morning, would we remember how to respond?
Some of the people who would answer the phone in Vancouver are still there. The seismometers on Rainier are still recording. The Stafford Act is still law. FEMA still exists in name, with most of a workforce, for now.
But the warning coordination meteorologist who would call the emergency manager in Yakima or Tacoma or Portland may have taken a buyout. The senior FEMA executive who would coordinate with the state may have left in the May walkout. The Volcano Disaster Assistance Program may be running on a skeleton crew. The HR specialist who would surge hiring in a disaster may have been detailed to ICE to vet deportation officers and never come back. The Coast Guard rescue swimmer who would jump out of the helicopter may be on a cutter in the Eastern Pacific looking for cocaine. The acting FEMA director may not have been briefed on what the Cascades Volcano Observatory does, or that it exists, or that David Johnston ever lived. The senior officer of the United States Coast Guard, whose job is to answer the phone, is sleeping in the wrong house because a civilian has not packed.
The boom we did not recognize in 1980 traveled for hundreds of miles before we understood what it was. The boom that worries me now is the quiet one happening in offices in Washington and Vancouver and Norman and Silver Spring, where the people who would answer the phone are leaving, and the buildings are emptying, and the lesson learned in blood across the last hundred years is being unlearned by people who think the lesson was the problem.
Hurricane season starts in two weeks. The mountain has been quiet for a while. The apparatus is being asked to do more with less while being pointed in the wrong direction, and at some point the math stops working and people die who did not have to die.
I rode home muddy that Sunday morning in 1980 and walked into a different world. The country I walked into knew, somehow, that we were going to help each other. The country I walked into had just lost a mountain and was looking around for a way to make sure it never lost the next one without warning.
I am telling you, on the forty sixth anniversary of the boom we did not recognize, that the country I walked into is being murdered in offices we have never seen by people we did not vote for, in the name of a slogan that means nothing, in service of a profit that goes to people we do not know, at the cost of a watchtower we are going to need.
The mountain is patient. The mountain will give us another lesson.
I would prefer we still had a country prepared to receive it.
About the Author
