Eruption
The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A riveting history of the Mount St. Helens eruption that will "long stand as a classic of descriptive narrative" (Simon Winchester).
For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists, sightseers, and nearby residents listened anxiously to rumblings in Mount St. Helens, part of the chain of western volcanoes fueled by the 700-mile-long Cascadia fault. Still, no one was prepared when an immense eruption took the top off of the mountain and laid waste to hundreds of square miles of verdant forests in southwestern Washington State. The eruption was one of the largest in human history, deposited ash in eleven U.S. states and five Canadian providences, and caused more than one billion dollars in damage. It killed fifty-seven people, some as far as thirteen miles away from the volcano’s summit.
Shedding new light on the cataclysm, author Steve Olson interweaves the history and science behind this event with page-turning accounts of what happened to those who lived and those who died.
Powerful economic and historical forces influenced the fates of those around the volcano that sunny Sunday morning, including the construction of the nation’s railroads, the harvest of a continent’s vast forests, and the protection of America’s treasured public lands. The eruption of Mount St. Helens revealed how the past is constantly present in the lives of us all. At the same time, it transformed volcanic science, the study of environmental resilience, and, ultimately, our perceptions of what it will take to survive on an increasingly dangerous planet.
Rich with vivid personal stories of lumber tycoons, loggers, volcanologists, and conservationists, Eruption delivers a spellbinding narrative built from the testimonies of those closest to the disaster, and an epic tale of our fraught relationship with the natural world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Olson (Count Down) brings cinematic structure to descriptions of the events surrounding the eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, finding in them a lesson for those tasked with mitigating the effects of future disasters. He sets the scene by presenting the history of the U.S. Forest Service and describing the growth of Weyerhaeuser, a forest-products company that owned much of the land around the mountain. Olson also introduces geologists and their attempts to convey the extent of the volcano's capabilities once it began to rumble in March. A group led by the Forest Service proposed restricting areas, authorized by governor Dixy Lee Ray, but they left land owned by Weyerhaeuser unrestricted despite its proximity to an ominous bulge in the mountain's side. With the danger clear to readers, Olson follows the individuals who were near the mountain on the night before the eruption, reconstructing the final moments of those who died and the paths that the survivors took to where they could be rescued. He concludes with descriptions of the explosion's aftermath, the establishment of the national monument, and the scientific advances based on research on the eruption. Making it clear that these deaths could have been prevented by properly established restricted areas, Olson takes a detailed and human-centered look at a terrible disaster.
