Top Pension Systems in the World
How the U.S. compares may (or may not) be a surprise

By JEAN FOLGER
Updated Feb 28, 2020
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Top 3 Pension Systems
How the U.S. Scored
How All Countries Ranked
Index Scoring Explained
The Bottom Line

The quality of pension systems available to workers varies greatly across the globe. The Netherlands has the best, while the U.S. isn't even close to the top, according to the Melbourne Mercer Global Pension Index 2019.1

The index, published by the Monash Centre for Financial Studies in collaboration with global consultant Mercer, examines the pension systems of countries across the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific and makes recommendations for how they can improve. Here, we take a look at the results of the latest index, released in October 2019, which ranked the pension systems of 37 countries representing more than 63% of the world's population.2

The Top 3 Pension Systems
The index compares retirement income systems and rates each based on its adequacy, sustainability, and integrity. The index value for each country is represented by a value between zero and 100, with higher value signifying more favorable pension systems.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The Netherlands, Denmark, and Australia, respectively, have the best pension systems.
The U.S., meanwhile, ranks far from the top.
Common challenges pension systems around the world need to address include increasing the average retirement age due to rising life expectancy, encouraging more savings, and limiting access to funds before retirement.

The average score for the 37 countries included in the 2019 index was 59.3. The top three countries with the highest overall index grade were:2

1. Netherlands

With an index value of 81, the Netherlands received the highest score for 2019 and ranked first for the second year in a row.2

Its retirement income system uses a flat-rate public pension and a semi-mandatory occupational pension linked to earnings and industrial agreements. Most of the Netherlands' employees are members of these occupational plans, which are industry-wide defined-benefit plans. Earnings are based on a lifetime average.3

 The index found that the overall index value could improve with:

Increasing household savings and reducing household debt

Increasing workforce participation among older workers as life expectancy rises

2. Denmark

Denmark came in a close second with an overall score of 80.3.2

Worldwide, pension systems are under more pressure than ever before because of rising life expectancy, increased government debt, uncertain economic conditions, inflation risk, and a shift towards defined-contribution plans.

Denmark has a public basic pension scheme, a supplementary pension benefit tied to income, a fully funded defined-contribution plan, and mandatory occupational schemes. 4 The index noted that Denmark's score could be improved by:
Increasing household savings and reducing household debt

Introducing measures to protect the interests of both spouses in a divorce

Increasing workforce participation among older workers as life expectancy rises

3. Australia

Australia ranked third with an overall index value of 75.3 in 2019.2 Its pension system includes a means-tested age government pension, mandatory employer contributions paid into private-sector plans (primarily defined-contribution plans), and voluntary contributions from employers, employees, and the self-employed paid into private-sector plans.5 

Here's what Australia could do to improve its overall index value:


Increasing the net replacement rate in the government pension for average income earners

Increasing household savings and reducing household debt

Mandating that part of the retirement benefit must be taken as an income stream

Increasing workforce participation among older workers as life expectancy rises

Increasing the pension age as life expectancy rises

How the U.S. Scored

The U.S. tied with Malaysia ranking 16 with a score of 60.6, which was better than 2018 when it came in at 19 with a score of 58.8.12 The U.S. retirement income system includes Social Security and has voluntary private pensions, which can be occupational or personal.


The index had numerous recommendations for what the U.S. system could do to improve its overall index value:


Raise the minimum pension for low-income retirees

Adjust the level of mandatory contribution for median-income earners

Improve the vesting of benefits and maintain the value of benefits through to retirement
Limit access to funds before retirement

Require that part of the retirement benefit be taken as an income stream

Increase Social Security funding

Raise the state and private pension age to receive benefits

Provide incentives to delay retirement and increase workforce participation among older workers

Provide access to group retirement plans for workers who don’t have an employer-sponsored plan

How All Countries Ranked

The following chart shows the 37 countries included in the index and how their pension systems scored and ranked in 2019:2


GLOBAL PENSION SYSTEM RANKING BY COUNTRY
RANK COUNTRY 2019  INDEX 

SCORE

1 The Netherlands 81
2 Denmark 80.3
3 Australia 75.3
4 Finland 73.6
5 Sweden 72.3
6 Norway 71.2
7 Singapore 70.8
8 New Zealand 70.1
9 Canada 69.2
10 Chile 68.7
11 Ireland 67.3
12 Switzerland 66.7
13 Germany 66.1
14 United Kingdom 64.4
15 Hong Kong 61.9
16 United States 60.6
16 Malaysia 60.6
18 France 60.2
19 Peru 58.5
20 Colombia 58.4
21 Poland 57.4
22 Saudi Arabia 57.1
23 Brazil 55.9
24 Spain 54.7
25 Austria 53.9
26 South Africa 52.6
27 Italy 52.2
27 Indonesia 52.2
29 Korea 49.8
30 China 48.7
31 Japan 48.3
32 India 45.8
33 Mexico 45.3
34 Philippines 43.7
35 Turkey 42.2
36 Argentina 39.5
37 Thailand 39.4

Source: Melbourne Mercer Global Pension Index 2019

Index Scoring Explained


The Melbourne Mercer Global Pension Index is calculated using the weighted average of three sub-indices. The average sub-index scores for all 37 countries were 60.6 for adequacy, 69.7 for integrity, and 50.4 for sustainability.2 This is what each sub-index takes into consideration:

Adequacy Sub-Index


The adequacy sub-index, which represents 40% of a country's overall index value, looks at how a country's pension system benefits the poor and a range of income earners. Additionally, the adequacy measure considers the system's efficacy and the country's household savings rate, household debt, and rate of homeownership.

Sustainability Sub-Index

The sustainability index, which represents 35% of a country's overall index score, considers factors that can affect how sustainable a country's retirement fund system. Indicators include the level of coverage of private pension plans, the length of expected retirement now and in the future, the labor force participation rate of older workers, government debt, and economic growth.

Integrity Sub-Index


The integrity sub-index makes up 25% of a country's overall index value. It examines the communication, costs, governance, regulation, and protection of pension plans within that country. It also considers the quality of the country's private sector pensions because, without them, the government becomes the only pension provider.

The Bottom Line

The Melbourne Mercer Global Pension Index includes recommendations to improve each country's retirement-income systems, acknowledging that no universal solution exists because each system has evolved from unique economic, social, cultural, political, and historical circumstances.

Common challenges in pension systems around the world include the need to increase the average retirement age to reflect increasing life expectancy, encourage more savings, and increase access to private pensions for the self-employed. Pension systems globally should also limit access to funds before retirement and improve transparency to improve participants' understanding and confidence.

ARTICLE SOURCES

Investopedia requires writers to use primary sources to support their work. These include white papers, government data, original reporting, and interviews with industry experts. We also reference original research from other reputable publishers where appropriate. You can learn more about the standards we follow in producing accurate, unbiased content in our editorial policy.



Mercer. "Global Pension Index Reveals Who Is the Most and Least Prepared for Tomorrow's Ageing World." Accessed Feb. 28, 2020.


Monash University. "Global pension index uncovers strong correlation between household debt and pension assets." Accessed Feb. 28, 2020.


Government of the Netherlands. "Pension." Accessed Feb. 28, 2020.


Government of Denmark. "How does the pension scheme work in Denmark?" Accessed Feb. 28, 2020.


Government of Australia. "Age Pension." Accessed Feb. 28, 2020.

Work-from-home productivity pickup has tech CEOs predicting many employees will never come back to the office

Silicon Valley leaders tell MarketWatch they agree with Twitter’s stance on allowing workers to stay at home forever if they wish

MarketWatch photo illustration/iStockphoto

Published: May 16, 2020 By Jon Swartz

THIS IS ABOUT WHITE COLLAR PROLETARIANS* 

If you rebuild the workplace after COVID-19, will the workers ever come back?

In Silicon Valley, the answer from many tech companies is that many won’t, and maybe that’s a good thing.

In recent days, Twitter Inc. US:TWTR has said that employees have the option of never coming back to the office to work, while Facebook Inc. US:FB, Google parent Alphabet Inc. US:GOOGL US:GOOG, Salesforce.com Inc. US:CRM and Slack Technologies Inc. US:WORK have said they don’t expect workers back in the office until 2021 — if then.


That just may be the beginning: At least six prominent tech companies are considering permanently moving a large slice of their workforces to work-from-home status, their chief executives told MarketWatch this week.


“It’s hard to not see 20% to 40% of our workforce be remote,” Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told MarketWatch in an interview Thursday on — appropriately enough — a Zoom US:ZM video call.

“We need to make real-estate decisions long in advance, two to three years, and are in the speculative conversation now if we have 30%, 40% fewer desks,” Butterfield said in discussing conversations he was having with fellow Slack executives this week. “We may make the office more of a hotel.”


Don’t miss: Companies reveal their plans for what work will look like when America returns to the office

The COVID-19 pandemic forcing those who could work from home to do so has led to a surprising result — improved productivity. U.S. workers were 47% more productive in March and April than in the same two months a year ago through cloud-based business tools, chat applications and email, according to an analysis of 100 million data points from 30,000 Americans by workplace-monitoring company Prodoscore.

“I was pretty wrong about this. I thought productivity was going to plunge, but it has been very good,” Okta Inc. CEO Todd McKinnon US:OKTA added, as the company considers a new dynamic work initiative. He said he could see Okta following Twitter’s path “until there is a vaccine or a treatment.”

As small businesses and nonessential services slowly begin to reopen, tech CEOs like Butterfield and McKinnon US:OKTA are in internal discussions about fundamental changes to their workforces with far-reaching social implications. Not only are they open to letting a majority of employees work remotely; they’re vastly scaling back travel and attendance at conferences, hiring talent from all parts of the country, reducing office space and using the office as a place to socialize as much as work.


The financial impact on cities like San Francisco and Seattle, where tech is the chief economic engine, could be devastating. Use of commercial real estate and public transit are likely to decline. Restaurants, bars and other gathering spots could be endangered. And then there is the toll on workers, many of whom feel increasingly isolated and stressed, worried about the security of their jobs even as they log long shifts at home.

But that is the collateral damage from a new workforce that could also save companies billions of dollars in operational costs; greatly reduce traffic and liability related to sick employees; and enhance productivity from a workforce that eats, sleeps and lives at its diffuse, de facto offices. Tech is uniquely positioned to take advantage of working conditions turned upside down and sideways because it has the technical resources to support a decentralized workforce, and a significant slice of its employees already worked remotely.

In a free-wheeling “virtual dinner” this week attended by five software CEOs — McKinnon, Box Inc.’s US:BOX Aaron Levie, PagerDuty Inc.’s US:PD Jennifer Tejada, Twilio Inc.’s US:TWLO Jeff Lawson and Zuora Inc.’s US:ZUO Tien Tzuo — the topic elicited the most animated conversation.

See also: Twitter employees can work from home as long as they wish

“Twitter will cause a snowball of other organizations going forward,” said Levie, who has weaned on the management style of former Intel Corp. US:INTC CEO Andy Grove, who weaved through offices to get an up-close look at workers. “We may not go back to work the same way [at Box]. Things are faster, more action-oriented with remote workers. With videoconferencing, I can check in on customers in the U.S., Japan and Europe in one day.”

“Our salespeople meet five to eight customers a day now [via videoconferencing] versus the one it took them three days [to see in the past] because of travel,” he added.

A major reason for improved productivity is that people have had little else to do during the shelter-at-home directive and felt pressure to produce to retain their jobs, countered Shane Metcalf, chief culture officer at 15Five, an enterprise technology company.

“One of the shadow side effects is that employees are working longer hours, and feel as if they’re always on call,” he said. “They are stressed.”

See also: Cisco profit continues to flow amid pandemic despite revenue slowdown

To be sure, not everyone will follow Twitter’s lead. Some, like Apple Inc. US:AAPL, Nvidia Corp. US:NVDA and Amazon.com Inc. US:AMZN, have devoted billions of dollars to sparkling new facilities that will always house thousands of employees. And some people want to return to an office, pointed out PagerDuty’s Tejada.

Added Butterfield: “Some employees are going insane [because they] are cooped up alone in an apartment or have kids and want to go back to work. The majority want to be in the office.”

“We don’t believe that ‘office-less globally’ is in our company’s best interest to build strong company culture or long-term productivity. Like most things in life, the best answer is typically something that moderates between two extremes,” Vonage Holdings Corp. US:VG CEO Alan Masarek told MarketWatch via email. None of the company’s 2,400 employees will be required to come back to the office “until they are comfortable doing so.”

Record traffic usage of Zoom, Microsoft Corp.’s US:MSFT Teams, Slack Technologies Inc.’s US:WORK enterprise messaging, Cisco Systems Inc.’s US:CSCO Webex and other services underscores the always-on workplace.

“Some elements of this work-from-home scenario will not go away,” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said during a conference call with analysts Wednesday following the company’s quarterly earnings announcement. For example, Webex hosted more than 20 billion meeting minutes in April, compared with 14 billion in March and 7 billion in February.

“The pandemic has created a permanent shift in the way people are working, and while not every organization will go 100% work from home forever, there will certainly be more support for virtualized environments,” Masarek said.

One company going all-in virtually is Dialpad because, quite simply, it can. CEO Craig Walker, who helped develop Google Voice technology, was leaning that way before the pandemic forced most of the economy to shut down. He wants the communications-software firm’s 400 employees to work from home four or five days a week, he said, and he plans to halve office space to accommodate a staggered work schedule.

No matter what path companies take, they agree it will not be the same. Some employees will exclusively work from home, while others will opt for the office. And others may do both.

“It’s back to a whole new way of work — like back to the future,” says Quick Base CEO Ed Jennings, who took over the $1 billion, 500-person company this week, but has yet to visit headquarters.

Still, he’s already re-imagining what it will look like in the future — with more open space, partitions and collaboration spaces.

“It is hard to create depth of relationship when you communicate strictly via virtual meeting,” Jennings said. “Employees say these days they get things done so much faster at home. The question is whether that is sustainable.”

* BLUE, WHITE OR PINK NO MATTER THE COLOUR OF YOUR COLLAR WE ARE ALL PROLETARIANS NOW

Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump share a moment on Twitter — then the creator of ‘The Matrix’ claps back

Published: May 17, 2020 at 11:25 p.m. ET

Are we living in "The Matrix"...? Warner Bros/Everett

‘Take the red pill.’

That’s Tesla TSLA, -0.51% boss Elon Musk delivering a cryptic message on Sunday to his 34.3 million Twitter TWTR, +1.54% followers — the latest in a long line of his social-media headscratchers.

After Musk recently named his child ‘X Æ A-12,” nothing should come as a surprise anymore. But, really, what is he talking about this time?


Well, for the uninitiated, the “red pill” is a reference to the science-fiction classic “The Matrix.”

Without going too far down the nerdy rabbit hole, the film’s protagonist, played by Keanu Reeves, is given a choice: He can take the blue pill and return to his regular life, or he can choose the red pill and learn the whole truth about living in a computer simulation.

Basically, blissful ignorance or hard truths.

Over the years, the internet has put its spin on how the phrase can be used, and the “red pill” has come to mean very different things to different groups of people. As with just about everything these days, political lines have been drawn between the red and blue pills.

Urban Dictionary captures the range of interpretations. The one Musk was probably going for says the red pill “opens someone’s eyes and mind to the secret truth of something important.”

Then there’s the one Musk’s critics prefer: “A small fundamentalist internet subculture of angry, thirsty, mostly white, conservative males who blame all their romantic and social failures on women.”

Either way, Musk got the endorsement of President Donald Trump’s daughter:

From there, fans of both Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump celebrated their beloved red-pill takers, and the right-wing political awakening many assumed it to mean.

But the woman behind referenced phrase, “The Matrix” co-creator Lilly Wachowski, wasn’t having it, and she showed up in their mentions to completely kill the vibe:

As far as the red-pilling of Musk,he has stolen headlines lately as an unlikely hero of the right, calling stay-at-home orders “fascist” and threatening to move Tesla out of California.  His protests have drawn the ire of critics, including one San Diego assemblywoman who hit him with an F-bomb after he said he was taking his headquarters to Texas or Nevada.

Trump pushes 'warp speed' effort on coronavirus vaccine, ignoring lessons from a long-ago drug calamity:
THALIDOMIDE
Jerry Adler Senior Editor,Yahoo News•May 16, 2020


Along with everyone else in the world, President Trump wants a coronavirus vaccine now.

Or, if not now, then “prior to the end of the year,” as he said at the White House on Friday, which Moncef Slaoui, the drug company executive the president tapped to head the effort, called a “very credible” timetable. By historical standards, it is an extraordinarily ambitious goal. Some vaccines have taken a decade or longer to develop, test and manufacture. The most optimistic time by which a coronavirus vaccine might be ready, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading infectious disease specialist on the president’s coronavirus task force, is 12 to 18 months.

Underscoring his sense of urgency, Trump has compared the vaccine effort to the Manhattan Project to develop an atom bomb during World War II, and dubbed it “Operation Warp Speed.”
President Trump speaks in the Rose Garden on Friday. (Stefani Reynolds/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty images)

Warp speed is an invented term for travel faster than light, which is possible only in the fictional universe of “Star Trek.” Whether it will work for the creating a vaccine for a lethal disease remains to be seen. But there are a few hundred, possibly thousands, of people now in their 60s who are living reminders of the unintended consequences of putting a drug into people’s bodies without adequate testing.

Genetic engineering greatly speeds the process of developing a vaccine. But public health experts are still sorting through how to test it for safety and efficacy. The primary measure of safety, of course, is that a new vaccine doesn’t make people sick, which is easy enough to verify, although it would need to be tried in a large and diverse population to catch possibly rare side effects.

Efficacy is more complicated: Researchers can detect if people inoculated with the vaccine produce antibodies to the coronavirus, but how do they know if they are actually immune from future infection. One way, obviously, is to just watch them and see if they get sick (technically, if they get sick less often, or less severely, than an unvaccinated control group). But that’s a slow process. The other way, which is gaining support among researchers, is a “challenge trial,” in which volunteers receive an inoculation and then are exposed to an infectious dose of the virus — which clearly poses risks of its own. Challenge trials are usually done for diseases that are not as lethal as the coronavirus, or for which other therapies exist.

Quoted in The Hill, Jeffrey Kahn, director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, said he did not see how an institutional review board that oversees research would approve a human challenge trial for the coronavirus.
 

Children born with malformed limbs getting used to using prostheses, July 1962.(Stan Wayman/The Life Picture Collection via Getty Images)

But Operation Warp Speed is proceeding along numerous tracks simultaneously: the genetic engineering of potential vaccines, testing in animals, trials in humans, and ramping up the production of the syringes, vials and other equipment necessary for mass inoculation. On Friday, Trump said “we’re gearing up” to begin manufacturing vaccines even before one (or more) is approved, so that there will be a stock on hand in advance. “That means they’d better come up with a good vaccine,” he said. “It’s risky, it’s expensive,” but it could cut a year off the time that might otherwise be required to put a vaccine into distribution.

Vaccines, of course, are suspect to a dismayingly large segment of the population, but for other reasons. Many Americans believe that they cause autism in children, an assertion that has been investigated and declared spurious by virtually the entire medical profession. That’s not what this is about.

Trump has boasted frequently about his success in speeding up the approval process for drugs, a move long urged by pharmaceutical companies, which regard it as a costly obstacle to getting their products to market. And in the coronavirus emergency, epidemiologists and bioethics experts generally are going along with steps that could make a vaccine available sooner.

After all, what could go wrong?

The FDA’s website itself holds a possible answer, in the form of a tribute to a now-forgotten hero of bureaucracy, a physician and pharmacologist named Frances Kelsey. In 1960, she joined the FDA, where her job was to review applications for drug approval.

The first application she handled was for a sedative called thalidomide, which was used in the treatment of leprosy and was being marketed to prevent “morning sickness,” the nausea and vomiting that affects some women during pregnancy. The drug company presented data that it said proved its safety. It was already being sold over the counter in other countries.

Kelsey was unconvinced and asked for more data. The company sent in more studies, but she was adamant. Among other red flags, the manufacturer hadn’t proven that thalidomide was safe when taken by pregnant women. This was, of course, a period in American history when government regulations were more commonly referred to as “life-saving” than “job-killing,” and the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations appear not to have interjected themselves into the debate.

President John F. Kennedy stands with Dr. Frances Kelsey, the medical officer who prevented the sale of the birth defect-causing drug thalidomide in the United States. (Bettmann Archive via Getty images)

A year later, with FDA approval still pending, reports began to circulate of a peculiar, and devastating, syndrome of birth defects among the children of mothers who had taken thalidomide early in their pregnancies. The children, some of whom were miscarried or stillborn, had damage to various organs and, famously, malformed, missing or greatly shortened limbs, in the most severe cases with hands and feet that grew directly out of their torso. Some 10,000 babies were born that way in Germany, Britain and other countries. There were a few dozen cases in the United States, believed to have resulted from a loosely supervised trial, but nothing like the thousands that might otherwise have resulted.

Kelsey later was honored by President John F. Kennedy with the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service. Thalidomide was eventually approved, under restrictions, for use in treating some cancers. The episode led to the Kefauver Harris Amendment to the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, which was adopted in 1962 and greatly tightened regulation of the pharmaceutical industry.

Of course, while COVID-19 is a lethal and highly contagious disease, morning sickness, though unpleasant and sometimes debilitating, is not fatal and goes away by itself. So the standards for approving a vaccine or treatment for the coronavirus should be set with that in mind.

Still, it would be nice if Kelsey, who died in 2015, at age 101, was around to take a look at the paperwork. One can hope her successors will do as good a job.

PS CANADA IGNORED HER ADVICE AND DID NOT FOLLOW THE AMERICANS RESULTING IN MANY MORE THALIDOMIDE BABIES IN CANADA THAN IN THE USA

PER POP SIZE

An unforgettable day in May

The eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, did untold damage and sent volcanic ash over B.C., Alberta and even Saskatchewan. Two Canadians who were nearby share their memories of that fateful day.

By Rhianna Schmunk

May 17, 2020

Rosemary Taylor was nearly finished lacing up her hiking boots at a dusty trailhead in southeastern B.C. when the first distant bang rocked the stillness of the morning.

It was just past 8:30 a.m. on May 18, 1980, the peak of the long weekend, the day already warm beneath a sky of perfect blue.

Moments later, a second boom.

"I thought, that's funny on a quiet Sunday holiday morning," said Taylor, who was 39 at the time.

Her group couldn't think of any quarry or mining activity happening in the area. They paid the noise no more attention and carried on with their hike.

When they reached the viewpoint along the trail hours later, they couldn't see a thing. The sky had gone a foggy grey.


       PPE BECAME RARE THEN AS NOW 
THE MASK WAS SELLING FOR $1.50 

More than 600 kilometres away, Catherine Hickson was cutting her camping trip short and hurtling away from the source of the noise.

She was hanging out the passenger side of a green Renault station wagon, looking back at an exploding volcano. A third-year geology student, Hickson took photos and told her husband, who was driving, to keep his eyes forward as they roared away down the logging road.

"The first memory is this unbelievable black, seething cloud expanding and just rushing towards us. That's the indelible memory in my eye sockets," said Hickson.

Catherine Hickson took this photo of the eruption as she and her husband raced away from the volcano's base. (Submitted by Catherine Hickson)

The eruption of Mount St. Helens was the deadliest and most destructive of its kind in American history, leaving nearly 60 people missing or dead and destroying more than 250 homes. A torrential landslide wiped out thousands of acres of Washington state forest, leaving a lifeless wasteland in its wake.

The explosion, which struck 40 years ago on Monday, sent pale grey ash as far as southeastern B.C. and parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

I WAS GOING TO THE UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE AND WE GOT COVERED IN ASH I STILL HAVE A CONTAINER OF IT 
Hickson, who was 25 at the time and living in Vancouver, had been camping about 14 km east of the volcano base that Victoria Day weekend out of sheer curiosity.

Pressure had been building at Mount St. Helens since mid-March, and geologists across the continent were watching closely.

"Here was an eruption taking place basically in our backyard," said Hickson, who is now 65.

She was sitting in her car, admiring the view of the snow-capped peak after a breakfast of bacon and eggs, when the earth growled.

A chunk of the volcano’s northern face slipped away in a massive landslide at 8:32 a.m. Uncorked, the volcano exploded. Rocks, ash, volcanic gas and steam were hurled high into the air at more than 480 km/h.

A mess of volcanic debris began to gush down the mountainside, obliterating anything in its path.

Hickson was on her feet outside the car.

"At first it was incredibly exciting — like, oh my god ... this is it," Hickson said. "But that massive cloud ... it moved out incredibly rapidly."

Archive footage of Mount St. Helens eruption on May 18, 1980
1:07

CBC Archives footage shows the devastation caused by the eruption on May 18, 1980.

Part of the blast cloud surged over the rim of the newly formed crater and barrelled down the side of the volcano, heading east.

"We could see what we knew were mature Douglas firs basically being enveloped underneath the front of this cloud, in this roiling, boiling mass of ash. It was then that we realized that we were in extreme danger," Hickson said.

The couple rounded up their dogs, sprinted back to the Renault and raced south down the logging road.

"It’s terror, pure fear. [Her husband’s] asking me what's happening and, at that point, I thought, that's the end. This eruption is just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and we're going to be completely enveloped in it."

The couple escaped. It turned out their campsite had been out of the volcano’s reach. They circled back hours later to retrieve the camping equipment they’d abandoned — they were students and gear was expensive — before heading home to Vancouver.

After the explosion, Catherine Hickson returned to the area to assess the damage, at one point standing next to a toppled Douglas fir tree. (Submitted by Catherine Hickson)

Hickson scribbled field notes on scraps of paper in the car during the drive.

At a pit stop late in the afternoon, Hickson called her mother from a payphone to tell her what had happened. The volcano had blown up, Hickson told her, but they were OK and coming home.

Her mother didn’t quite understand until she watched the evening news.

In a subsequent call that night, "my mother gets on the phone and she’s not hysterical but beside herself," said Hickson.

Over on the east coast, 13-year-old Seth Moran was equally transfixed by the news that Sunday.

A self-described "volcano and earthquake nerd," he sat in front of the television in his home in Amherst, Mass., watching his first real-life eruption with equal parts fascination and terror.

Moran grew up to become scientist-in-charge of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory, responsible for studying and monitoring volcanoes in the Cascade range of the Pacific northwest.

Moran, now 53, said that over the past 10,000 years, Mount St. Helens has been the most seismically active volcano in the region. It saw a steady eruption period between 1800 and 1857, then a number of smaller eruptions after 1980, most recently in 2004.

If history is an accurate teacher, though, experts don’t expect anything like the 1980 blast to happen again in the near future.

A car more than 10 km northwest of Mount St. Helens' summit lies buried in more than a metre of volcanic ash on May 18, 1980. (U.S. Geological Survey)

A Washington state resident sweeps ash from the roof of his house on May 18, 1980. (U.S. Geological Survey)

"As a general rule with volcanoes, they blow up big and then there’s a long period of time before they erupt big again," he said.

"We don’t actually know what’s cooking down there … [but] St. Helens does go through those cycles of blowing itself up and then rebuilding, and we’re pretty clearly in a rebuilding phase."

Moran said a landslide of the magnitude of 1980 is unlikely because the chunk of the volcano that slid away back then is still missing.



Today, the Mount St. Helens Visitor Centre in Castle Rock, Wash., offers a straight-shot view, through a webcam, into the crater created in 1980. The surrounding landscape has adapted and regrown and a new ecosystem has taken shape, although hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to mitigate after-effects of the landslide in the nearby Toutle River.

"There’s a lot of regrowth that’s happened, there’s a lot of vegetation, but from the vantage point of the visitor’s centre, it’s still very fresh and very easy to see what happened back in 1980," Moran said.

To mark the 40-year anniversary of the blast, Hickson participated in two webinars this month with researchers and other witnesses, "to spend a few hours reminiscing."

An aerial view of Mount St. Helens in 2006. A chunk of the original volcano is still missing after the 1980 eruption. (AP photo via The Canadian Press)

Like Hickson's mother and teenaged Moran, Rosemary Taylor only learned of the eruption after the evening news aired. That night, two members of her hiking group had gone into town for a meal and returned with the story.

Prior to their trip, "there'd been a bit of discussion that Mount St. Helens was looking a bit dicey ... but who expected those volcanoes to blow up? Come on. They'd been dead for years," said Taylor, now 79.

"Well, dormant," she said, correcting herself. "They're never really dead."


Photos: U.S. Geological Survey; The Associated Press; submitted by Catherine Hickson | Video: CBC Archives | Editing: Andre Mayer

MT ST HELENS BON MOTS

First it expanded, now the volcano is shrinking

MOUNT ST HELENS

Shrinking from old age?

Since its 1980 eruption, the summit elevation of Mount St. Helens has decreased. A survey in 1982 gave a measurement of 8,365 feet. However, a lidar survey done in 2009 found the maximum elevation to be 8,330 feet, a full 35 feet lower. The difference in elevation is likely due to erosion and loss of rimrock by collapes of the steep crater-walls, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.


Could the volcano have had a Russian name?

It’s common knowledge that Capt. George Vancouver named Mount St. Helens in 1792 after The 1st Baron of St. Helens, Alleyne FitzHerbert. But who was FitzHerbert, besides being a friend of Vancouver’s? Well, for one thing, he never saw the mountain named after him. But he was well traveled. He was England’s foreign minister to Russia from 1783 to 1788, during the reign of Russian Empress Catherine the Great. He also was foreign minister to Spain from 1790 to 1794. Notably, a lot of the Alaska’s volcanos have Russian names because Russia-sponsored explorers discovered that area startingin the mid 18th century: Davidof, Vsevidof and Veniaminof are among them.


What about the lava dome, or should it be lava domes?

What is known as the lava dome is actually two separate domes: The first was created in successive eruptions starting in October 1980 and continuing periodically through 1986. A second dome, which formed during a continuous eruption from 2004-08, formed just to the south of the first dome and eventually merged with it. The summit of the combined lava dome is at 7,155 feet above sea level — nearly 1,200 feet below the summit — and nearly 900 feet above the 1980 crater floor. It is 3,500 feet in diameter at its base. Its estimated volume, 97 million cubic yards, is enough to cover three lanes of freeway 12 feet deep from Seattle to San Francisco. Two earlier lava domes that formed in June and August 1980 were blasted away by subsequent explosive eruptions.

The ashfall myth

It’s amusing when people say they remember the ashfall in the Kelso-Longview area from the eruption on May 18, 1980. But there was none. All of that ash blew eastward, away from Cowlitz County. It wasn’t until the following Sunday, May 25, 1980, that the county got its first — and only — significant ashfall from the volcano. That eruption occurred during an overnight rainstorm, and the coating of wet ash on power substations caused massive power outages throughout the county.


Was that another eruption?

After the mountain blew so catastrophically, it was common for local people during the summers immediately following the eruption to ask whether giant smoke plumes caused by slash burns — giant fires set to clear logging debris and which are now rare — were eruptions on the east. Landscape-scale slash burns now are largely a thing of the past, but you can count on volcanic eruptions being part of Cowlitz County’s future for millennia.

So how many eruptions have there been since 1980?

Too many to count, really. The mountain had erupted steam, ash and gas for two months before the big blow on May 18, 1980, a period in which its north flank swelled five feet a day. Following May 18, five explosive eruptions later that year sent clouds of ash and steam eight or nine miles into the sky on May 25, June 12, July 22, Aug. 7, and Oct. 16. Quiet “dome building” eruptions continued through October 1986. A period of continuous dome-building occurred from 2004-08. The last explosive eruption of any significance occurred on March 19, 1982. For the last 12 years, the mountain has been largely quiet except for periodic earthquake swarms, which geologists interpret as fresh molten rock moving into the volcano to refuel it for its next eruption. And no one knows when, or how big, it will be. But of all Cascade Range volcanoes, scientists consider Mount St. Helens by far the most likely to erupt next. It’s also rated the second most dangerous volcano in the nation by the USGS, but only because so many people live downvalley of Mount Rainier, which is ranked most dangerous.


Why is that big stack of dredge spoils near the mouth of the Toutle River nicknamed Harry’s Mountain?

No, it is not named after Harry Truman, the 84-year-old lodge owner at Spirit Lake who perished along with his cats on the morning of May 18, 1980. It is named after Harry Claterbos, the Astoria-based contractor who dredged that section of the Cowlitz River under a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contract following the eruption.

So, just how many volcanoes?

Most people know that Mount St. Helens is a volcano on the “Ring of Fire,” a 25,000-mile long, horseshoe-shaped arc that borders the Pacific Ocean. But just how many volcanoes are located along the ring? Mount St. Helens is one of 452 volcanoes on the Ring of Fire, which contains 75% of the world’s active and dormant volcanoes.


Now that’s a lot of debris

The debris avalanche that toppled off the top and side of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980 is considered the largest landslide in recorded history. It was about 16 miles long, contained more than 3 biilion cubic yard of debris, has an average depth of more than 100 feet and is about 600 feet deep at its thickest point. But another landslide off the volcano during its so-called Cougar eruptive stage (28,000 to 18,000 years ago) likely was bigger. That one came off the south side of the volcano. It originated near Butte Camp in the southwest part of the present-day mountain and left a deposit 600 to 900 feet thick and 17 miles long. It temporarily dammed the Lewis River, and when that dam broke it caused flooding downstream as far as the Columbia River and filled the lower Lewis River Valley with volcanic debris at least 200 feet thick, according to the USGS.

What you see today

Most of what you see of Mount St. Helens is younger than 3,000 years old, which makes it younger than the pyramids in Egypt. And although the volcano’s eruption on May 18, 1980 was dubbed “a worst case scenario,” an eruption that occurred about 3,600 years ago was four times larger, measured by how much ash got blown into the sky.

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Autopsies reveal many Mount St. Helens victims suffocated

By

JAN ZIEGLER

BOSTON -- Most of the 35 known victims of Mount St. Helens' May 1980 eruption died within minutes from inhaling volcanic ash, and others were 'dried and baked' to death by the blazing heat, autopsy results revealed today.

'The first autopsies were a step into the unknown,' pathologists and medical examiners reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. 'We were unable to find previous references to this type of death in the medical literature, and we had little idea of what to expect.'

The 25 bodies examined were found between 4 to 17 miles from the mountain near Vancouver, Wash., where more than 13 billion gallons of superheated water burst forth as steam on May 18, 1980, carrying fiery volcanic gases and particles into surrounding residential areas.

'The most common cause of death was asphyxia by inhalation of volcanic ash. Seventeen of the deaths were attributed to this cause, and in two more it was contributory,' the examiners said.

The eruption killed at least 62 people who had been camping or sightseeing around the base of the mountain. Thirty-five bodies have been recovered and 27 people are listed as missing and presumed dead.

Many victims were found buried to knees, waist or shoulders in ash. Others weretrapped in vehicles covered by volcanic dust.

The post-mortems were conducted by the King County Medical Examiner's Office in Seattle, Wash., the University of Washington, the University of Oregon and Oregon State Medical Examiner's Office in Portland, Ore.

'The first impression was the all-pervading gray, gritty ash that covered the bodies and their clothing. When incisions were made, the ash dulled scalpel blades within the first few inches.'

The researchers said the ash plugged the lungs of asphyxiation victims in most cases and most of the victims' hands were mummified because of the extreme heat.

Burns accounted for three deaths and contributed to two more. The burns, however, were different from those seen in a fire, the researchers said. The victims, exposed to hot volcanic gases, were 'dried and baked' down to their internal organs.

Three more victims died of other causes, such as being struck by a tree limb, the examiners said.

The examiners said death by asphyxiation probably occurred within minutes -- although there appeared to be time to escape before the ash cloud enveloped the area.

The examiners said it was possible use of disposable dust masks - common after the eruption -- or adequate shelter could have saved lives during the volcano's activity.

But it said, 'For those who were at Spirit Lake at the base of the volcano, one cannot imagine reasonable protective easures.'

A Sitting President, Riling the Nation During a Crisis
Alexander Burns, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin and Nick Corasaniti,
The New York Times•May 17, 2020
 

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters as he departs the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, on May 5, 2020. (Al Drago/The New York Times)

Even by President Donald Trump’s standards, it was a rampage: He attacked a government whistleblower who was telling Congress that the coronavirus pandemic had been mismanaged. He criticized the governor of Pennsylvania, who has resisted reopening businesses. He railed against former President Barack Obama, linking him to a conspiracy theory and demanding he answer questions before the Senate about the federal investigation of Michael Flynn.

And Trump lashed out at Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger. In an interview with a supportive columnist, Trump smeared Biden as a doddering candidate who “doesn’t know he’s alive.” The caustic attack coincided with a barrage of digital ads from Trump’s campaign mocking Biden for verbal miscues and implying that he is in mental decline.

That was all on Thursday.

Far from a one-day onslaught, it was a climactic moment in a weeklong lurch by Tru​mp back to ​​the darkest tactics that defined his rise to political power​. Even those who have grown used to Trump’s conduct in office may have found themselves newly alarmed by the grim spectacle of a sitting president deliberately stoking the country’s divisions and pursuing personal vendettas in the midst of a crisis that has Americans fearing for their lives and livelihoods.

Since well before he became president, Trump’s appetite for conflict has defined him as a public figure. But in recent days he has practiced that approach with new intensity, signaling both the depths of his election-year distress and his determination to blast open a path to a second term, even at the cost of further riling a country in deep anguish.

His electoral path has narrowed rapidly since the onset of the pandemic as the growth-and-prosperity theme of his campaign disintegrated. In private, Trump has been plainly aggrieved at the loss of his central argument for reelection. “They wiped out my economy!” he has said to aides, according to people briefed on the remarks.

It is unclear whether he has been referring to China, where the virus originated, or health experts who have urged widespread lockdowns, but his frustration and determination to place blame elsewhere have been emphatic.

Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, said that Trump and his campaign were going on the offensive in nasty ways in an attempt to shift the attention of the public away from him and onto other targets, and ultimately onto Biden.

“If this election is about Trump, he probably loses,” Goldstein said. “Trump’s only hope is to make the election about Biden.”

A number of Republican operatives believe Biden’s advantage is soft and that his penchant for gaffes will at least make the race more competitive than it would otherwise be amid a pandemic and an incipient economic depression.

“We have a very good story to tell on him, and we’ve got to do it,” Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist, said of the negative narrative his party aims to generate about Biden.

Still, Trump’s behavior has rattled even some supportive Republicans, who believe it is likely to backfire and possibly cost them the Senate as well as the White House. It has also further alarmed Democrats, who have long warned that Trump would be willing to use every lever of presidential power and deploy even the most unscrupulous campaign tactics to capture a second term.

In many respects Trump’s approach to the 2020 election looks like a crude approximation of the way he waged the 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton, attacking her personal ethics, often in false or exaggerated terms; taking Clinton’s admitted errors and distorting them with the help of online disinformation merchants; and making wild claims about her physical health and mental capacity for the job. Given that the 2016 campaign — the only one Trump has ever run — ended in a razor-thin victory for him, it is perhaps not surprising that the president would attempt a kind of sequel in 2020.

But there are vitally important differences between 2016 and 2020, ones that amplify the risks involved both for Trump and for the country he is vying to lead.

He is running against an opponent in Biden who, despite his vulnerabilities, has not faced decades of personal vilification as Clinton did before running for president. And unlike 2016, Trump has a governing record to defend — one that currently involves presiding over a pandemic that has claimed more than 80,000 American lives — and he may not find it easy to change the subject with incendiary distractions.

Yet with the responsibility to govern also comes great power, and Trump has instruments available to him in 2020 that he did not have as a candidate four years ago — tools like a politically supportive attorney general, a Republican-controlled Senate determined to defend him and a vastly better financed campaign apparatus that has been constructed with the defining purpose of destroying his opponent’s reputation.

His attacks over the last week on Obama have showcased Trump’s persistent determination to weaponize those tools to bolster a favorite political narrative, one that distorts the facts about Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser, in order to spin sinister implications about the previous administration.

But Trump also appears to genuinely believe many of the conspiratorial claims he makes, people close to him say, and his anger at Obama is informed less by political strategy than by an unbending — and unsubstantiated — belief that the former president was personally involved in a plot against him.

This weekend, Trump will huddle with some of his conservative allies in the House at Camp David, where they are expected to discuss the efforts — entirely fruitless up to this point — to prove Obama was involved in a conspiracy.

Of all Trump’s efforts, this one may be among the least concerning to Democrats, given Obama’s strong popularity and the degree to which Trump’s claims of an “Obamagate” scandal have been confined so far to the usual echo chambers of Fox News and right-wing social media. As he did in 2016, Trump is trying to force other outlets to cover the matter through repetition on his Twitter feed.

Democratic anxiety about the president’s attacks on Biden runs higher. But in general Biden’s advisers have professed confidence that the severity of the country’s problems will make it difficult for Trump to retake control of the campaign and that Biden’s fundamental political strengths make him well positioned to survive a campaign of attempted character assassination.

On a conference call with reporters Friday, Mike Donilon, one of Biden’s closest advisers, said Trump was transparently engaged in “an all-out effort to take people away from what they’re living through.”

“I think that’s going to be real hard to do because the country has really been rocked,” Donilon said. “And where the president has succeeded in the past in terms of throwing up lots of distractions and smoke screens and trying to move the debate to other questions, I don’t think he’s going to succeed here.”

The president has been grumbling about his own campaign and this week complained to allies that he had not significantly outraised Biden in April, according to a Republican who spoke with Trump.

Still, Trump’s political operation has moved over the last month to devise a plan for tearing down Biden, who does not inspire great enthusiasm in voters but is held in higher esteem by most than the incumbent president. The result has been a blizzard of negative digital and television ads battering Biden on a range of subjects in a way that suggests Trump’s advisers have not yet settled on a primary line of attack.

The campaign’s ads on Facebook are as relentless as they are varied, as if plucked from a vintage Trump rally rant: Some make unfounded inferences about Biden’s mental state, saying “geriatric health is no laughing matter.” Others paint the presumptive Democratic nominee as “China’s puppet,” highlighting statements that Biden made when he was vice president, like, “China is not our enemy.” Still others stick to traditional themes of illegal immigration.

Over the last week, the Trump campaign has spent at least $880,000 on Facebook ads attacking Biden.

Yet there are persistent doubts even within Trump’s political circle that an overwhelmingly negative campaign can be successful in 2020, particularly when many voters are likely to be looking for a combination of optimism, empathy and steady leadership at a moment of crisis unlike any in living memory. And the more Trump lashes out — at Biden and others — the more he may cement in place the reservations of voters who are accustomed to seeing presidents react with resolute calm in difficult situations.

Private Republican polling has shown Trump slipping well behind Biden in a number of key states. Perhaps just as troubling for Trump, it has raised questions about whether his efforts to tar Biden are making any headway.

Last month, a poll commissioned by the Republican National Committee tested roughly 20 lines of attack against Biden, ranging from the private business activities of his son, Hunter Biden, to whether Biden has “lost” a step, a reference to mental acuity. None of the lines of attack significantly moved voter sentiment, according to two people briefed on the results. There were some lines of attack that had potential, one of the people briefed on the results said, but they were more traditional Republican broadsides about issues like taxes.

Trump has also been warned by Republican veterans that his efforts to define Biden in negative terms so far have been slow or ineffective. At a meeting with political advisers this week that included Karl Rove, the top strategist for former President George W. Bush, Rove warned Trump that he had fallen behind in the task of damaging Biden, people familiar with the meeting said.

Part of the challenge, though, is that Trump constantly undermines his own team’s strategy, in ways big and small. While he finally stopped doing his daily press briefings, after weeks of pleading from his allies, he still makes comments on Twitter or to reporters nearly every day that hand Democrats fodder and make Republicans squirm.

In addition to his attacks against Obama, he separated himself from the highly popular Dr. Anthony Fauci, downplayed the importance of testing and has refused to wear a mask. And Trump’s appetite for conspiracy theories is often embarrassing to his party: Several times in recent weeks, he has falsely accused a prominent television host of murder and called for a “cold case” investigation.

The president also routinely misses even the political opportunities his advisers deliberately tee up for him.

When Trump was visiting Pennsylvania this week, for instance, his team scheduled a friendly interview in the hope that he would make the case that Biden would undermine fracking, an important industry in Pennsylvania. But Trump made no mention of fracking and instead attacked Biden’s mental condition and called wind power a “disaster” that “kills all the birds.”

“He’s come back down because that’s where his natural state is,” said Terry Nelson, a Republican strategist, referring to Trump’s slide in the polls after a short-lived bump in March. “Because he’s not in position to rally the country in a way a president traditionally would in a situation like this.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company