When acid rain from Ohio Valley coal plants acidified 14,000 Canadian lakes in the 1980s, the U.S. dragged its feet for over a decade. After Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, ash darkened British Columbia within 36 hours, and a geology student caught in it went on to build Canada's volcanic response plan. One country sends invoices; the other brings a shovel.
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While more American politicians complain about smoke from Canadian wildfires crossing the border, let's do the math on what came the other way. For most of the 1980s, literal tons of acid rain fell on eastern Canada, drifting up from the United States. Specifically, coal plants burning high sulfur coal in the Ohio River Valley. Prevailing winds carried it northeast onto the Canadian Shield, which is granite, and And granite doesn't neutralize acid the way that, say, limestone does. 14,000 lakes in eastern Canada ended up acidic enough to matter. The clearest human cost showed up in hospital charts. One study had kids at a summer camp blow into spirometers for 6 weeks, and their lung function dipped every time an acid haze episode rolled through. Now, when the Canadian government asked the Americans to, uh, you know, knock it off, President Reagan's solution was to appoint a a special envoy for the rain. Reporting at the time called it mostly symbolic. It took more than a decade for the American government to get around to changing its laws. And then there was the time the sky went black. May 18th, 1980, 8:32 in the morning. Mount St. Helens blows its entire north face off. Here in Southwest BC, the shockwave rattled windows so hard that the CBC later reported it came close to breaking them outright. The eruption sends a column of ash 24 kilometres into the sky. Within a day and a half, that ash drifts into BC across the prairies, the heaviest dump landing along a corridor running from Fernie through the Kroseneth Pass into Lethbridge. In Trail, people woke up to a sky so dark they'd worried that there'd been an accident at the local smelter. I was 10 when this happened. I remember it. Ash was on every windshield in town. And in every lung. Also affected, a 25-year-old geology student named Catherine Hickson, who was camping 14 kilometers from the volcano when it went off. She survived, and that day rerouted her career. She later helped Canada's national plan for responding to volcanic events. A plan that was later studied and partially used by the US, which is sort of a rich irony into itself. That's what we did. What we didn't do was ask the US to rake out its volcanoes. We didn't invoice them for windshield wipers. We didn't threaten a tariff over a natural disaster. You know, every family has the sibling who keeps a ledger of every favor owed and one who just shows up with a shovel. Countries are the same. We know which one we are.
