Through historical and eyewitness accounts,
scientific analysis and amazing photos, Rob Carson’s Mount
St. Helens: the Eruption and Recovery of a Volcano, takes
us back to the blast of 20 years ago:
“By the
evening of May 18, Mount St. Helens was a smoking crater,
hollowed-out and grey. It looked defiled, like the victim of some
grisly crime. Mount St. Helens had burst into volcanic eruption at
8:32 that morning, exploding sideways with a blast so powerful it
knocked down trees 17 miles away. When the ash cleared, the
mountain had dropped in rank from Washington’s fifth-highest peak,
at 9,677, to its 30th highest, at 8,364 feet.”
Carson, a reporter for The News
Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., paints a picture of quick
destruction. In a matter of minutes, 234 square miles of green
forest resembled the ashen surface of the moon. Fifty-seven people
were killed; watersheds were clogged with
ash.
Yet life returned quickly to the mountain.
Thanks to the pocket gopher, one of the lone survivors in the blast
zone, ash has been mixed with underlying fertile soil, allowing
seeds to take root. Plant life attracted birds and, eventually,
foraging mammals. Life’s processes started over
again.
Humans have ventured back as well, turning
the geologic event into a tourist attraction. Today, five visitor’s
centers cover the mountain, although Mount St. Helens continues to
grumble and to spit plumes of steam. Carson says most scientists
assume Mount St. Helens will erupt again. “Predicting when such a
disaster might happen is impossible, even with all the tiltmeters,
satellites and seismometers in the world. Perhaps more useful than
any of those tools is an old Japanese proverb: “A natural
calamity,” the ancients said, “will strike at about the time the
terror of the last one is
forgotten.”
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline ‘A natural calamity’.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
