Since the eruption, Mount St. Helens’s victims have been blamed many times for their own deaths. Even in the Pacific Northwest, most people still think that the victims were there illegally, that they went around roadblocks or otherwise broke the law to get where they were. That belief is the product of a carefully fabricated lie. Dixy Lee Ray and other public officials were unwilling to take any blame for the disaster. They stuck steadfastly to the story that the victims had been warned and shouldn’t have been where they were.
