Eruption : : the Untold Story of Mount St. Helens

Locations
Call Number: 363.349 Ol, Adult Book / Nonfiction / Science & Nature / Earth Sciences / Olson, Steve
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	363.349 Ol	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Science & Nature / Earth Sciences / Olson, Steve	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Science & Nature / Earth Sciences / Olson, Steve	4-week checkout	Due 05-24-2024

The land -- The warnings -- The conservationists -- The eruption -- The rescues -- The monument -- Decline and renewal -- Epilogue.
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.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Excellent retelling submitted by ValerieL on March 31, 2016, 2:29pm I really enjoyed this book. Mr. Olsen did a wonderful job of combining the scientific information about the eruption with the more personal stories of those who died in the eruption and the survivors. The combination of the two work together to show just how powerful the Earth can be and how much destruction can happen in an instant.

The re-telling of the victims' and survivors' stories is just phenomenal. The ingenuity and perseverance of the survivors was amazing and a wonderful example of the human spirit.

The only complaint I have about the book is that two separate times, the author takes us on a tangent and neither really needed to be included in the book. They didn't add to the story line and in fact, their inclusion detracted from the story line. The first was the history of the WeyerHaeuser Logging Company and the family behind it. The second was a shorter tangent about Griffon Pinchot, who helped establish the national forestry services we have today. Both tangents are interesting on their own, but their inclusion in this book was definitely not the right decision.

All in all, I enjoyed the book and I will definitely be reading it more than once in order to help all the scientific information sink into my brain.

1980 St Mount St. Helens submitted by m steve on June 24, 2020, 12:52pm This is a very well written and researched book. The suspense of the upcoming disaster and the awesome violence of the eruption makes for an engaging history.