Margaret Harris reviews Eruption by Steve Olson
Seconds before a cloud of dust and ash swept his observation post off the map, the American volcanologist David Johnston managed to send one last radio message: “Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!” “It” was the devastating eruption of Mount St Helens on 18 May 1980, which laid waste to hundreds of square kilometres around the once-picturesque peak, scattered ash across 11 US states, and killed almost 60 people, Johnston included. The many factors – scientific, political and personal – that combined to put them in danger are the subject of Steve Olson’s book Eruption.
The book gets off to a slow start, with a long section devoted to the Weyerhaeuser timber company. The connection is that Weyerhaeuser owned much of the land around the volcano, and its grip on the local economy and politics (plus its desire not to interrupt clear-cutting operations over something so trivial as an active volcano) meant that the exclusion zone set up around the mountain was smaller than the scientists would have liked. But Olson’s intense focus on Weyerhaeuser (which includes a lengthy digression on its mid-19th century founding) and its battles with conservationists leaves correspondingly less space in the book for the science of the Mount St Helens eruption, and for the stories of the individual human beings caught up in it.
This is too bad, because Olson is a gifted science communicator, and he also makes the most of his source material later in the book when writing about the narrow escapes of several survivors. In one especially harrowing passage, Olson describes how two photographers drove at 100 mph down narrow, winding roads to outrun the blast, passing a slower car on a blind bend some two miles outside the supposed danger zone. The photographers survived. The occupants of the slower car did not.
- 2016 W W Norton £17.99/$27.95hb 320pp
