Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / Eruption, The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens: Author Steve Olson

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Eruption, The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens: Author Steve Olson · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: You get dumber and dumber every time.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's hard work.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, but you know what?
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: I am a believer that everybody has to be good at something.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that's just what I'm good at.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: What is it?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: Define that what you're good at.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: You're getting dumber.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm getting dumber.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm good at that.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I agree.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: I concur.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: I concur.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like the Benjamin Button of dumb.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: I started off super smart.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: And then you're getting dumber?
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just getting dumber.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you're also getting less cranky throughout the day.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: You're much happier now after we talked to Steve Olson.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: When you when we talked before, you were not in a great mood today.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: I was not in a great mood today.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um had a lot of issues with my Google Calendar and syncing and all that.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: I gotta have all my stuff in one spot, and it's just like, oh my gosh.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Don't even start with this story.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: Don't start ripping on me about technology and being an old rambly, you know.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, all right.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: I'll lay off.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: I'll lay off.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: All right, hey, we just got done with this interview that you, the listener, are about to hear with Steve Olson, amazing science writer.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: He's written for The Smithsonian, Scientific American, published multiple books, one of which we focused on in this interview.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: He's a consultant writer for the National Academy of Sciences.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: He's on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I mean, this was a cool interview.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: We focused on, well, really one book on Mount St.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: Helens that he wrote, right, Chris?
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Mount St.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: Helens, the Untold Story.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: And this was a you know, this is a different interview for for you and I, um, because everything that we've done or most of what we do is is coming at this straight up from a science perspective.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know, he's uh he's a science writer, and it's a unique job.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's really interesting job.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: I agree completely.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: It is I'm a little bit obsessed with it.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: And on that note, we're we have a little bit of a theme going here with our interviews of of science writers in the next few weeks here.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: So in the coming weeks, we'll be talking to people who are science writers, and it's I agree, completely obsessed with this job.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's a very important, very cool job, and they have a very different high-level view of what's interesting both from the public side and from the sort of scientific community side.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd first like to start off by recommending the book.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because I I don't you don't need a deep science background to enjoy the book, but if you have a deep science background, you're still going to enjoy the book.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: It reads, there's a lot of history.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: To me, it was like a historical novel.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's the way it read.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the title is Eruption, the Untold Story of Mountain St.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: Helens.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: And again, it's by Steve Olson.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I kind of messed that up, didn't I?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: No, you got it right.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: I just wanted to reiterate.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: Did I get it right?
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you did.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: You did.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not correcting you, I'm just just reiterating.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: So it's easy to look up on Amazon or however you get your book.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you interrupted me.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh sorry, Chris.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: I know you're I know you're being sensitive today.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: I am.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a really cool job, really cool and important perspective that he has.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: And the book covers a lot of different stuff.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I was ups you and I both were obsessed with the forestry side of it, which we get into in this interview.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, very cool.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: Lots of interesting perspectives from Steve, and very fun to talk to him.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: And how how all of these stories weave into the eruption of Mount St.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Helens.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: You look at it and you say, Well, you know, there's this whole history of the National Forest and and how the National Forest Service even came to be, right?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not random.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's not, in other words, what I mean is that that this that's a part of the Mount St.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: Helens story.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, absolutely.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I it was it all does weave together, just very well written.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: Very well written and uh a really uh really cool interview.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: Hope you enjoy it.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: Before we let you go, though, please like, subscribe, give us a review and a rating on your podcast app.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: Those really help us.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: Send us an email, planetgeocast at gmail.com.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: We love that stuff, and uh get in touch on social media.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_02: We're at Planet Geocast.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, let's get into it.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: Let's do it.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: Steve Olson coming at you.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, cool.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: Well, let's get started here, Chris.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: We are very excited to have Steve Olson, science author extraordinaire, joining us.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_02: Steve, welcome to Planet Geo.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, it's great to be here.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: We are very excited to talk to you.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: We've uh Chris and I, uh I don't know, Chris, when was it?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: 2009 we went to Mount St.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_02: Helens and uh We did.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: Is that right?
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_02: 2009?
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was 2009.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: We're there for a conference, uh in I think Portland, right?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: GSA in Portland.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: Portland GSA.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, we've seen Mount St.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: Helens together.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: We've read your book on Mount St.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: Helens, and uh, we're really excited to talk to somebody who is a great communicator of science and writes really interesting books, as we've read.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: So Steve, actually, I came across your article.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was in Scientific American, and that's what kind of led me down this path of contacting you to for this interview, is because you wrote a really interesting paper that really high highlighted the geology of Mount St.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: Helens and what's going on underneath it with the eye mush and all that kind of stuff.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that's how it all started.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that paper was to make up for the fact that I didn't talk as much in the science about the science in the book as I'd wanted to, even though I'm a science writer.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: I got so caught up in the history and the economics and the culture and the sort of human drama of what happened on Mount St.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Helens that day that I forgot to put in a lot of science.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I had to write that Scientific American article to uh capture some.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I really liked the article.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the diagrams and images were outstanding, and I actually use that for my upper level geology class.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: I use it in my class as a learning piece.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, yeah, you bet.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so as a bit of an intro before we get to the first couple questions here, the book we're gonna be referring to is Steve's book, The Eruption, The Untold Story of Mountain St.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: Helens.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: And this was in this 2016, is that right, Steve?
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: It came out?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, okay, all right.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the book we're gonna sort of focus on talking uh a lot about, I think, as we dive in here.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: But Chris, go ahead, take it away.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: All right, so this is a little bit different for us in Planet Geo.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: We usually ask our first question is usually how did you get into the geosciences?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, was there like this aha moment?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but that's not really your track, right?
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: Can you tell us a little bit about your background, Steve?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I really got into the geosciences through Mount St.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Helens, but I was always aware of Mount St.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up in eastern Washington State, so that's the dry part of Washington State, uh, wheat country, cattle ranching, about a hundred miles to the east, uh downwind of Mount St.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: But in the 1970s, I went back to East for college and I met the woman who would become my wife eventually in the back of an English class.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: I was a physics major, but I'd gotten interested in writing, so I took an English class there.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh three weeks before Mount St.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Helens was uh erupted, the big eruption on May 18th.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: She and I were preparing our wedding, uh, which was going to be held in Rhode Island.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: We got married on June 8th.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: So it's always a good reminder when we have an anniversary of Mount St.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: Helens that uh I have to go think about an anniversary present because it's just about just about time for wow, that's amazing.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, at that point, I I had not lived in Washington State for the previous four years, and I'd actually never had been to Mount St.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: But what happened during the wedding is that I still had many relatives who lived in Eastern Washington.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: My brothers were going to Washington State University, one lived in Spokane.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: My grandma still lived in the town where I grew up, Othello.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And they all brought little jars of ash back to the wedding that they had scraped off their driveways as sort of conversation starters for these new East Coast in-laws that they were going to make.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: So Mount St.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Helens was a big topic at our wedding next.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: That is funny.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: I think Chris has a uh a jar of St.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: Helens Ash as well, right, Chris?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: I do.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: I went out there a year later.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, my mom, my mom and dad always took a trip out there.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: My dad taught a field course out in uh Wyoming.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was relentless.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I said, and she had family in Portland, Oregon.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: So she took me as close as they would let us get.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I collected ash at a couple different places and I put them in little coffee tins, and I still have those.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I wrote a lab that I use in my geology classes based on the that ash that I collected when I was like, I don't know, eight years old.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: I still have a big jar of it that I take around.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever I talk about the book, I take this jar out because it has a very distinctive smell.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you ever open that jar, you can sort of see it.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't really smell like other kinds of dust or yeah, I I guess it has this uniquely volcanic smell.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Not so much like sulfur, but just sort of like a dry talcum pattern.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: It has a very unusual consistency.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: So it's often interesting for people to see that ash, since for the 57 people who died that day, it was sort of the last thing they experienced.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: Where did you collect the ash?
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I've gotten ash from many places.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: My uh my relatives brought it just from because they were downwind, they were covered by two or three inches of ash after the eruption.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: So there was still plenty of it there.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, when you go to eastern Washington today, I can still see places where the ash is piled up next to buildings.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's not as if it has entirely disappeared.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you know what it looks like and what it smells like, you can still see it there.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: Right on.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: That's interesting.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: So was that the day you decided you you thought you might want to write a book about Mount St.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: Helens, or was this sort of percolating for a lot longer?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, books always take a long time before you ever get around to writing them.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I realized it right at that point.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: I lived in Washington, D.C.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: for 35 years after graduating from college and only moved back to Washington State in 2009.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: So just about the same time as that GSA conference.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: And when I got here, I'd written some books previously, and I said to myself, you know, I really want to.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: When I was a kid growing up, I sort of took this state for granted.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't, I didn't appreciate all the many things that it had in it.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: On the contrary, I was sort of eager to get away from what seemed like the middle of nowhere, especially a small town in eastern Washington State, and go where the action was on the East Coast.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: But when I moved back, I had quite a different attitude.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, you know, I should really write some books about things that have happened in this state.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I looked around and said, Well, what's the most dramatic thing that has ever happened in Washington State?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it was clearly that was that was an easy one.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: So that was obviously the first book to write.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: So, question, Steve, have you done any recreating on the mountain or around the mountain then?
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Have you climbed it?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: No, that was uh that was one of my peak experiences in writing this book was climbing the mountain toward the end of writing the book.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so I, as I said in the book, I really got when you go to this to the mountain and you climb it from the south side and you look out over the crater and to the north.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: I can really see the whole story just laid out in front of me, exactly where everybody was.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: All the victims, you can look down and see this person was there, this person was there, this is how they tried to get away, this is where they succeeded or failed in being able to get away.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: It was just a sort of literally breathtaking experience to climb up that mountain.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's not, I mean, I waited until the mountain was 1500 feet lower than uh when it was originally.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: So that made it a bit easier.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's interesting.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: So that was your culminating experience in writing the book.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't your inspiration for writing it, it was the way you ended it, right?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was it was really climbing the mountain, yes, toward the end of it.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: Was it a clear day?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: It was.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've climbed it twice.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I did it once a few years ago, and it was perfect day, just blue skies, clear as can be.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I did it this summer, and we walked straight into a whiteout.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was you we get to the top and you can't see a thing.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the normal circumstance.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: I cheated because I had a pass that would allow me to go any day that I wanted.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, of course, I made it a perfect day.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: The passes to climb the mountain don't normally work that way.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: You have to pick them in advance and you just take whatever you get.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: So, Steve, where were you when the mountain blew?
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I was back in Washington, D.C.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: at that time.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: And what people tend to forget is that the eruption of Mount St.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Helens was a huge story all over the country.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, it was big here in the West Coast, but even back in Washington, D.C., I remember reading front-page stories from the Washington Post about what was happening with Mount St.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that's partly a reflection of these cascade volcanoes.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: We hadn't had a cascade volcano that had erupted uh previously since the eruption of Mount Lasson, well, Lasson Peak, in 1917, rather.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And really, that was in such a obscure part of the country, a very difficult part of the country, that very few people saw that eruption.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: So that was something that played into what happened before the big eruption on May 18th in the response to the volcano, that there hadn't been a cascade eruption for a long time.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was a remarkably long period to go without a cascades eruption.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, we're kind of in another one of those now.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I would expect one of these volcanoes to start acting up again.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: But when Mount St.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Helens acted up, it it was it was uh made headlines all over the world, really.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: So, Steve, in writing this story, where did you get your information?
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: You have some very compelling and descriptive descriptions of sort of what was happening on the ground, what it felt like to be in the eruption in the immediate aftermath.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: Did you talk to people who went through this?
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, like how did you get what were your main information sources here?
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I viewed the writing of this book as uh an excuse really to spend two years hanging out in bars and libraries down in southwest Washington State, because that's where I did uh perhaps equal amounts of my research were in those two places.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone in Southwest Washington State who's been there since 1980, and many people have a Mount St.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Helens story to tell.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: And now that we're at the what 40, I just have to pick up how many anniversaries I've had, uh 42, we're at the 42nd anniversary of the eruption.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: People who were in their 20s and 30s are getting toward the ends of their lives.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, in some ways, this was my opportunity to talk with these people while I still could.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Many of the people that were working on the mountain as loggers or were otherwise associated with the mountain in some way, they're still around.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to go down and talk with them while I could.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: That must have been uh quite a, I don't know, harrowing and fun experience at the same time talking to people about this sort of traumatic episode of their lives, right?
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Some people like to talk about it, and some people really don't like to talk about it, including many of the people who were closest to the mountain that day, many of the survivors.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: They've told their stories before, but it was a traumatic, uh scarring day for many scarring psychologically experience for those people to live through.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: And uh some people are comfortable talking with it, but a surprising number aren't.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: In those cases, I often would have to rely on their friends, their friends would tell me uh about uh their experiences.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, sometimes they had written them down previously, maybe they'd done an interview like this one shortly after the mountain erupted, and I would rely on those sources as much as I would trying to get people to talk about these terribly frightening experiences that they'd had 40 years ago.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think for me, what was a little bit striking, or something I maybe ignorantly had not recognized before, was that it's not this sort of you die or you don't die sort of thing.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of like survival of this eruption.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: Some of the descriptions of what people lived through is really astonishing.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: And and I don't know, that just kind of struck me uh in reading your book about how there's a lot of like destruction but not death.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it was not a binary thing, I suppose.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that just kind of really struck me.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: And you paint some really vivid pictures.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not surprising people weren't interested in talking about it, perhaps in some way.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: They had to make such difficult decisions.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: When I climbed the mountain there and was looking down on it, it reminded me of people who were caught in the blast that day.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: So as this gigantic cloud of hot gas swept out of the mountain at hundreds of miles an hour on the morning of, you know, at 832 on the morning of May 18th, 1980, there were people in the blast zone who saw it coming and they would jump in their cars to try to get away from it.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And they would reach a fork in the road.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: And in retrospect, if they'd gone one way, they would live, and if they'd gone the other way, they would have died.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it was it was a some combination of luck.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Some people made better decisions, some people made worse decisions.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I I think that's one reason why for so many people it's hard for them to relive that experience.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: Steve, I'm wondering, you know, you in your book, the stories were very vivid.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Can you pick one or two that stick with you and paint a kind of a picture for our listeners of what they went through?
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: One thing I say in that book is that uh the stories that happened to these people could easily have happened to me.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because the point I make in the book is that of the 57 people who died, only three of them were in the danger zone.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, two people had permission to be in the danger zone.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: The other 45, 54 people were all outside of the officially designated danger zones for the volcano, even though later they were accused of being too close to the volcano, and an intimation was made that they had been in places that they weren't supposed to be.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: That wasn't the case at all.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: So if I had lived in Washington State in 1980 and being interested in science as I was, I could easily have grabbed my brother and driven down I-5 from Tacoma or over from Othello.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I would have tried with him to get as close to the mountain as we could without breaking the law, and I would have been exactly in the spot where many of those people were who were killed uh that day in uh in 1980.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a really good point.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: That must be very difficult for those people that that survived this event to be, you know, kind of criticized for being in a place where they had every right to be.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was very difficult.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: It was very difficult for the families.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the reasons the families sued the state in Warehouser after the event for a wrongful death suit was to try to demonstrate that their family members had not been in the wrong, as even the governor of Washington State uh said at the time.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: And to prove that in fact it was a problem with the way that the danger zones were set up and enforced that had caused uh the deaths of their family members.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: So, Steve, can you tell us a little bit about then the way the zoning went down?
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you had the red zone, you had the blue zone, and how what was going on with all this?
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: What were the politics involved and Warehouser and how all of that came together?
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's the most fascinating story that I found in writing the book.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the subtitle of the book is The Untold Story of Mount St.
• 18:08
  unknown: Helens.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: So when I decided to write a book about Mount St.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Helens, I went and looked at all the other books that were available in the library, and plenty had been written about Mount St.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Helens, and they were quite different types of books.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: They were books about the geology of the volcano, uh, the the splendor of volcanic eruptions.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: I immediately, because I thought that, well, one of these people could easily have been me, I quickly got interested in the victims of the volcano and the people who were just barely able to get away.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: I was saying, now, why were they so close to this volcano?
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Some of those people were only three miles away from the peak of Mount St.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: And if you ever see pictures of it at the time, you you can realize just by looking at it how dangerous a volcano it was.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Pompeii was what, six or seven miles away from Vesuvius and was completely inundated within a couple of hours and destroyed.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, that's what turned out to be the case with Mount St.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I wanted to explore why those danger zones were so close, and that turned out to be quite an interesting story.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: When people are reading this book, they have to get through about a uh half of the book, is really a history of land use in some ways around Mount St.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: Helens, because it is that story that explains why these people were where they were on that Sunday morning.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think, I mean, that was something that we'll come back to certainly because I I was fascinated by the land use history that you painted there.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_02: But I want to touch on the decision-making a little bit.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_02: You've written about Mount St.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_02: Helens uh more recently from some of the modern science that's happening at Mount St.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: Helens, but can you give us a sense of how the decision-making process would be different today if this were to happen again?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: Do you get the sense that a lot has changed, or would we be sort of susceptible to some of the same problems you point out in the book?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: It has changed because Mount St.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: Helens was a great learning experience, not only for the scientists that worked on the volcano and studied the volcano uh during and after the eruption, but also for the public safety officers that uh could go back and analyze the some of the mistakes that were made in preparing for Mount St.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, it would be very different today.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: There would be a much more coordinated process, and frankly, a process that would uh emphasize safety to a much greater extent than was the case before Mount St.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, a disaster like Mount St.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: Helens, I can't see ever happening again in the Cascades because of all the lessons that Mount St.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Helens taught us about how dangerous these volcanoes can be, and about the kinds of steps that need to be taken to make sure that people stay safe.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: So some of the processes uh that we're engaged in in 1980 would not be the same ones that were done today.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: But again, it's understandable because there hadn't been an eruption like this in the United States.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: The only previous ones had really been in Hawaii, and US uh volcanologists had been studying uh volcanoes in Hawaii.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: But the Hawaiian volcanoes are a very different, very different kettle of fish than are the Cascade volcanoes.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: They behave in very different ways, and therefore some of the procedures set up to deal with Hawaiian volcanoes were not at all appropriate for Mount St.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, those procedures weren't translated over exactly.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: Accommodations were made, but at the same time, an appreciation of the explosive potential of Mount St.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Helens did not sink deeply enough into either the scientists who were studying Mount St.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: Helens or the government officials that were getting advice from those scientists.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's interesting.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we've on this podcast, we've talked to several people who are in charge of volcano observatories for the United States government.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, obviously the science has progressed since 1980 and the understanding of how volcanoes work.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it seems like the sort of interchange between public safety and scientists and industry representatives has advanced and is much more structured.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, it's it's good to hear you say that that you think that is also the case.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: Steve, um, real quick, I I didn't see anything that I recognized in the list, the acknowledgments at the end.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: The book.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Did you interview anybody from the USGS, whether the Cascades uh Volcano Observatory or the California Calvo?
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: I guess I did.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: Mostly people in the Cascades Volcano Observatory.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: Which of course did not exist in the year 1980, but many of the people who work at CVO, as it's called here in the Pacific Northwest, were involved in the eruption in one way or another.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm sure that I talked to almost everyone that the CVO who had some connection to the eruption in 1980.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: Though they must be near the end of their careers then at this point, right?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: They are.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: Oddly enough, I was just emailing one of them yesterday, a USGS uh geologist named Richard Waite.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: And if you ever want to get a really detailed description of exactly what happened to everyone who was around the volcano that day, without the accompanying history of my book, uh Richard Waite wrote a book that came out shortly after mine.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's called In the Path of Destruction.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he spent really 30 years interviewing survivors of uh who were around the mountain that Sunday morning to figure out exactly what happened to the volcano.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: Again, partly so that geologists could understand better, but over time it really just became a labor of love for Richard.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and and he put together just an astonishing collection of recollections from the people that were around the volcano.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's very cool.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_02: I'll have to check that out.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've heard of that book for sure.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: Steve, kind of Jesse, do you want to switch gears a little bit or do you want to just go?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: I think we should touch on uh I guess the the role of geoscientists really quickly before moving on there.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we're we're kind of on that theme.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: Has that You mean in terms of the decision makers?
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, has that sort of shifted, do you think, as well?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um I mean, not saying that us geoscientists know everything and should be the the rule of law in these situations, but do you see do you get the sense that that has changed a little bit?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: Because in some ways the geoscientists were maybe diminished or their opinions were diminished at this stage in Mount St.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_02: Helens' story?
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure it has changed.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, just the way the procedures are set up to interact with the public.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Back at the time of Mount St.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: Helens, uh, USGS only had like five public information officers.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I think none of them was assigned to Mount St.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the poor geoscientists who were studying the mountain all day would then have to show up at press conferences and essentially act as press officers, field all the questions from the press.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and that's a difficult task.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone who's uh interacted with those uh the you know, a big pack of uh press people who are answering very probing and very difficult questions knows you know you really need to know what you're doing and have some sort of specialized training to do that.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: And to throw these poor scientists out there in the middle of them uh is something that would never be done today.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's a really good point because the you you can't understate the importance of communications being a volcanologist.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, and maybe they're not the best to uh equipped to deal with that kind of thing.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: So since then, with Pinatubo and with some of the other large volcanic eruptions that have occurred since Mount St.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: Helens, the USGS and and other geological agencies in other countries have really ironed out some of these procedures.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's much better done now than it was back then.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um I watched uh kind of like a minute-by-minute thing of Mount Pinatubo and how the USGS, you know, they these geologists kept journals of of you know what happened and the events leading up to this.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: And one, it was a really stressful time.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like I can't hardly imagine what they were dealing with at the moment, um, but also then how they absolutely got it right.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think you're right, they learned a ton with Mount St.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: Helens.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: They referred to it quite often.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: In large measure on what they learned at Mount St.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: They were able to look at Pinatubo, uh, forecast what was going to happen with that mountain, and get people out of the way, probably saving thousands of lives in the process.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Chris, you want to shift gears here?
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let's go ahead and shift gears.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: So uh one thing, Steve, that that that I came up with in terms of reading this book is that uh struck with you sit in a kind of an interesting situation from where Jesse and I are looking at it.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um you're kind of at this intersection between nerdy science stuff and the public.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so how do you decide what to write about?
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: I've always been a science writer, so I've always done lots of magazine articles and I do a lot of work as well for the National Academy of Sciences.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: So many of the ideas that I've had for books and magazine articles have come from work that I've done with the National Academy of Sciences with committees there at the Academy.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: But one thing about books is they're gonna take you so incredibly long.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: A book will typically take me 3,000 hours to write, maybe 4,000 hours altogether.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: You've really got to be passionate about a subject to be able to spend that much time with it.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you really got to give a shit about that.
• 26:33
  unknown: Exactly.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: Keep going after it for that long.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: So the way it's always worked for me with books is that you get all kinds of ideas for books, but but you have to wait until you come across an idea that strikes you so forcefully that you know you're going to be able to keep up your enthusiasm through the hard days and nights of doing research and talking with people and writing those sentences over and over and over again and interacting with editors and the whole long, difficult process of putting a book together.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: If you guys have ever done ones, you'll know what I'm talking about.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe someday, Chris, you can uh work on your book and find something you want to spend 4,000 hours.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: Find something I'm passionate about, right?
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: Be passionate about.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's my recognition.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: Steve, but I want to I want to interject on this, Chris.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so Steve, I I'm curious, the National Academy.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: You you've worked with the the National Academy of Sciences.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I lived in Washington, D.C.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_02: for about four and a half years during my postdoc.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, a lot of my colleagues, my one of my closest mentors, is in the National Academy.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's always been sort of a career aspiration for me, you know, to be elected to the National Academy is like the best thing you can do as a scientist in many ways.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_02: What is that like for you?
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, what what is what does that job entail?
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_02: How do you find working at that level of science and considering what's interesting and important?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I I've just loved every minute of it.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I graduated from college in 1978 and went to work for a magazine for about a year or so.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was a physics major, so I sort of needed to learn how to write and what was involved in publications.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then in the year 1979, I wrote a letter to an editor at the National Academy of Sciences and I said, Wow, you guys put out a lot of reports, and I'm certainly never going to make much money by writing books or magazine articles.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: Do you ever need any help, any editorial and writing help in putting those reports together?
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: And uh he wrote me back another letter, it came in the mail a few days later and said, Well, sure, why don't you come on downtown?
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: I was living in Bethesda, Maryland at the time, just in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Sure, why don't you come down and talk to me about it?
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I went down there, talked with him, started working as an editor, in some cases, a copy editor, in some cases a consultant writer on various reports.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm still doing it here today, 43 years later, I was uh on a call this morning about uh a summit on genome editing that the National Academy of Sciences is putting together.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's just been a wonderful little niche as a writer to have, to constantly be engaged with uh these leading scientific issues.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: And also, as you say, the best scientists in the the entire world or serve on these committees at the National Academy of Sciences.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I get to work with them as a writer.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's really been a privilege for me to be able to do that.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you must gain just such an unbelievable view of science.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_02: This from like a 30,000-foot view of science at that stage.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's really a cool, uh, cool perspective you must have.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: As with many science writers, I know just a little bit about everything, but oh uh just about enough to get in trouble.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, only when I work on a long report do I really get to dive deeply into a subject that the National Academy assists.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but that's interesting because you get you get a view of what's important.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_02: Like the really truly important questions are that that's the only view where you get that, I think.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_02: Like a lot of us are too in the weeds to really sort of step back and you are for sure, Jesse.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, I I guess I should say I'm speaking for my own self, but yeah, that's that's very cool.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's a cool job.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: That building, too, is what a place to go to work every day.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_02: That building is beautiful, right on the National Mall with the Albert Einstein statue out front.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's back in the old days when we used to go be able to go to offices and buildings.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, that's right.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, Chris, I interrupted you.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's okay.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's okay.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: So, Steve, as you're picking in your way through in terms of what you want to write about, whether it's a you know, a journal article or whether it's a book, like you said you have to be passionate about it, but how do you view your job?
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what are you trying to do?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh when I read this Mount St.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: Helens book, I I got the distinct feeling that you you felt that it was important to tell and maybe preserve the history of these people and their story and how everything unfolded.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know, how do how do you view your job?
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: I guess my books in some ways have always been about how science and events that uh that have a scientific component have interacted with people.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: One of my books was on a mathematics competition every year.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: The International Mathematical Olympiad brings together teams of high school kids from all over the world in a big competition in the summer.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: And one of my books was about that.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so, sure, it was about the beauty uh and the genius that these kids have and being able to solve these mathematical problems, but it was also about these kids, some of the most remarkable people that I've ever met, were the six members of the US team that year.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: The book that I just wrote, which is about uh the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington State, which was just about 16 miles or so away from this small town where I grew up in Washington State, is sort of retells the story of the atomic age from the perspective of plutonium.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: But plutonium is a subject that has some inherent interest, but the real interest is in who discovered plutonium and how was it made?
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: And how did all these other pieces come together to make plutonium out of uranium requires nuclear reactors?
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: How did that all happen at the same time?
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then how was that plutonium used, both in the very first explosion, uh in the Trinity test in New Mexico, and then in the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, as a science writer, I think you learned pretty quickly that the way to tell stories about science is through the people who are involved in that science.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's something I learned in college.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: I took a writing class with John Hersey, the author of the book Hiroshima, and his influence on writing has always influenced everything that I've ever written.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's cool.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_02: I'm I'm very excited to read your book on plutonium.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um my 2022 reading list.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_02: As Chris knows, I'm obsessed with uh nuclear stuff, the history of it, the science of it, you know, uh everything about it.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: So uh it's it's definitely number two on my list of 2022 reading topics after I finish my current one.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'm excited.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_02: So let's go back to the Mount St.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: Helens book.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: I think one thing that really stood out to me, we touched on it earlier, was forestry.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: And you give this amazing history of forestry and the National Forest Service and sort of the evolution of foresting and logging companies in America.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I don't know, Chris.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: You and I have discussed this a little bit.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: Like, we don't quite know where we stand on it.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's a little bit of a yeah, I don't know.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's very interesting.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's obviously an important industry, but it's it's interesting.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know what to where I stand.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh to interject just a little bit, Steve, we did talk about this, and we we don't know where we stand on it.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: And to be honest with you, too, I don't know where you stand on it.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: You did a very good job of of you know, kind of staying neutral.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: Do you care to weigh in?
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's in some ways that's my job as a science writer, is to try to lay out the issues and let people decide.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: Think about how how they would decide on a particular issue.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad you guys like that section because there are readers of my book who uh hit a 20-page section on forestry in the United States and say, wait a second, this is a book about volcanoes.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_02: Oh no, that that kind of stuff it gets me going.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: I get fired up like, oh, we're gonna learn about the history of the National Forest Service.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that's super interesting.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_02: Or like, you know, this this Warehouser is it why how do you in the is it Warehouser?
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Warehouser.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: That I'm telling you, that whole story, yeah, that whole story was absolutely fascinating.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: So Jesse, we need to kind of jump into this a little bit then.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um let's do it.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: So, Steve, uh like I know as a writer you you kind of let everybody make their own decisions, but do you care to weigh in on this on uh just a conversational podcast about how you're gonna feel about it?
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, on the warehouses, on the warehouses and the forest service.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: Those are contentious topics here in the Pacific Northwest.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_02: Speaking of the Pacific Northwest, like has the relationship there changed since Mount St.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: Helens with the public, the Forest Service, the industry, the logging industry?
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: How are those dynamics shifted in the past 40 years, in your view, since you Well, I should I should explain a little bit about the context of the book and why this long section of forestry is in there?
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that'd be great.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: One of the big determinants of where the safety zones were placed around Mount St.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: Helens before the eruption of May 18th had to do with the ownership of the land around Mount St.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: It turned out that the Warehauser Company owned basically all of the forests between the peak of Mount St.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: Helens and I-5, about 35 miles to the west.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: And they had bought that land in the year 1900 from the railroad baron Jim Hill, who happened to live next to the founder of the Warehouser Company, Frederick Warehauser, on Summit Avenue in St.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: Paul.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: So part of the process of understanding where these danger zones were and why they were placed there has to do with the fact that these two industrial leaders of the Gilded Age happened to live next to each other in St.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: Paul.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: And otherwise, a lot of this wouldn't have happened.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: So Warehauser loggers in the spring of 1980 were cutting the last of the old growth forest that Frederick Warehauser had bought 80 years before.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it was right up on the flanks of Mount St.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: And this was a time where the Warehouser logging company was eager to uh get rid of the last of the old growth forests on the land that it owned, send it through the mills that were large enough to handle those trees, because that old growth forest, those uh those dug firs and western red cedars, I mean, they'd be eight, 10 or more feet across.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: So it takes special kinds of saws to be able to do this.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: Where hazard was cutting down the last of those trees, after which they figured, well, we'll shut those mills, we'll sort of convert the company into a tree farm.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: We will grow and cut down second, third, and in some cases fourth generation trees and send those through our mills.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: So they were very eager to continue their logging on the flanks of Mount St.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: Helens in the spring of 1980.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the reasons, and the danger zones were set up so that it was right on the dividing line between Warehouser property, where the logging was going on, and the property that had fewer trees on it on the mountain and around the mountain, uh, which was still in the National Forest, which was in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the reason why the danger zone at one point was only three miles or so away from the volcano, because that happened to be the boundary line between private and public property around Mount St.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, on that Sunday morning, uh, people who wanted to get a look at the volcano could get within three miles of the volcano and not be inside the danger zones.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting that Warehauser still allowed access, you know, through his property, right?
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that at the time the situation was very different.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: In in 1980, Warehouser was one of the largest corporations here in Washington State.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: It was bigger than Boeing.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: It was bigger than most major U.S.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: corporations.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: Warehouser was a huge operation.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: People tend not to think about it.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: But when I was growing up here in Washington State in the 1960s and 1970s, if I had wanted to stay in Washington State, like so many people before me, instead of going east to college, I would probably have gone to work for Boeing or gone to work for Warehouser.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's just what kids in this state did.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's how big and dominant those companies were at the time.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: My father worked for Warehouser when he uh when he was growing up at Efres.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: My grandfather was a uh got involved in the timber business, was actually killed when he was out logging uh trees right uh by Wenatchee Lake, just on the other side of the mountains from Seattle.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: So many families here in Washington State have this uh direct and generations-long connection, uh, not only with logging, but with the Warehouser Corporation, because it was the Warehouser company that was doing the majority of the logging here in Washington State.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: There were many other logging companies, but Warehouser was the largest and most influential.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the other ones kind of took their lead from the Warehauser Company.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: You asked uh how things have changed.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: The Warehauser Company is not the dominant force, of course, in Seattle economics or politics, like it might have been in 1980.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: That uh that's left now to the Microsoft's and Amazons and uh those kinds of companies.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, not the big extractive industries and Boeing that existed in 1980.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_02: So is it still in places around Mount St.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_02: Helens?
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_02: Is it still a major or a dominant employer in the region?
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so logging is still very active in those regions.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a very different kind of logging.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: In the old days, you would, I mean, they had thousands of people, well, I would say hundreds of people working around Mount St.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: Helens on the week.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: So one interesting thing about the eruption of Mount St.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: Helens is that it occurred on a Sunday morning.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: Warehouser was still largely had a largely union workforce at the time, and the unions made sure that their employees were not working on the weekends.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so there were very few Warehouser loggers in the woods, just a few people doing contract work on that Sunday morning.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if the eruption would have occurred just 24 hours later, if it would occurred Monday morning at 8:32, there would have been hundreds of Warehouser loggers who would have been killed in the woods around Mount St.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's really hard for me to conceive of how that company could have survived if that would have happened to it.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: It would have been an industrial disaster of the of the first magnitude if that happened.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: Warehouser would just dodged an incredible bullet by the fact that that mountain erupted on a Sunday rather than a Monday or anywhere day.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's a really interesting point.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_02: Hadn't thought about that from a sort of public perception standpoint of the company itself.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I started telling that story because I was mentioning that there were hundreds of people around Mount St.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: Helens at the time building roads, working as choker setters, uh, working as loggers, uh, loaders, and things like that.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, today, many of those jobs have been replaced by a single person sitting in the cab of a logging machine that can go through the woods and chop down the trees with like with these gigantic scissors and load them up onto trucks.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you would have just a handful in the people in the woods who would be doing the same kind of job that hundreds of people were doing back in the 1980s.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why that's what that's another reason why Warehouser is so much smaller company now.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: Have they diversified?
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: Are they into other things now?
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oddly enough, they were even more diversified in 1980.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: They really retreated into just being a timber company, and as a result, are a smaller company than they were back.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_02: I also found the uh the is it Pincho?
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_02: Is that Pinchot?
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_02: How do you pronounce it?
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Gifford Pinch, right?
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_02: Pinchot, okay.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I live um in Pennsylvania, eastern Pennsylvania, and I drive past Gifford Pinchot State Park.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_02: I've always been curious about the name, and then lo and behold, reading your book, oh that's who the guy that's the guy who was named for.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm real that was a really cool story of you know establishing forestry as a science.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_02: Is that I don't know, can you speak to that a little bit or or sort of what why you focused on forestry as a science a little bit um in this perspective?
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: I did want to tell that story, and and uh the national forest right around Mount St.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: Helens is the Gavrapincho National Forest.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was named after him, and he did spend some time in the Pacific Northwest uh when he was the head of the Forest Service at the beginning of the 20th century.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if not for him and Teddy Roosevelt, many of the national forests that we have in the country today wouldn't exist or certainly wouldn't exist in the form that they do.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the stories that I wanted to tell in this book, one of the untold stories, was about the conservation efforts that were underway before the volcano erupted to try to protect the area around Mount St.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: Helens from logging and other kinds of uses that made it less attractive for recreation.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then how that story continued after the volcano erupted and radically changed the landscape so that the conservationists who were involved in the volcano had to completely rethink their approach to what should be protected around Mount St.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: Helens and what could be protected.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: So again, I wanted to trace that story all the way back to its origins with why that national forest was set up in the first place, what its conflicts were between the national forests and between the private landowners around Mount St.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: And again, because that had a big influence on what happened that particular day and in the weeks and months, both before and after the eruption, when the Mount St.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: Helens National Monument was uh was established.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, such a cool story.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_02: Chris and I, again, we talked about that quite a bit as well about the national forests.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_02: You know, Chris and I have we've gone mineral collecting in a lot of national forests around the country together and camping various camping trips and things like that.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, understanding the history of of that entity in a very detailed way from its formation was very interesting.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_02: Perspective.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_02: I love that part of your book.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that's one of the reasons you go mineral collecting is because the Forest Service allows you to do that.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: If you were in a national park, it would be a very different circumstance.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was interesting too in the book.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you delineated the difference between national forest and national park and how that came to be, which is something that a lot of people don't understand.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: And Jesse and I have had some confrontations with police officers and things like that.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: Let's clarify.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_02: Because we're in the national forest, but near the national park boundary, and police officers didn't quite understand that we were in one and not the other.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_02: Chris, we need to clarify.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_02: We're not breaking we're not out there breaking tons of rules.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: I understand.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_02: I understand.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_02: So reading my book will keep you out of jail in that case.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_02: So that's okay.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_02: There we go.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_02: Read the book, stay out of jail.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: I want to ask you about the corridor from I5 going toward um St.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: Helens, where you would uh you know do the approach to climate from the south side.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: There's still logging going on, but uh uh from what I remember, and this is just straight up from memory, most of the land that we were going through was it an electrical company?
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um do you know about that?
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, a lot of it still would have been Warehouser because Warehauser has a very large tree farm around there and they are still chopping down trees on a regular basis.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: They'll go, they'll come in and clear cut uh a hillside and then replant that hillside.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh often not with the trees that were there originally.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh noble fir tends to be one that's used closer up toward the in the higher elevations toward Mount St.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh let those trees grow for 20, maybe 25 years, come in and chop them down again and repeat the whole process.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: But the the way that the land, the land use in the United States is has such an interesting story all by itself.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: The ways in which the tenants established by Thomas Jefferson were followed, in that the land was surveyed into these one square mile sections, divided up into six square mile townships.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then each of those square miles, or in some cases half sections or quarter sections, were sold to very different people.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: And adjacent sections would be used in different ways.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you'd have a private landowner right next to a public landowner, right next to a local municipality, right next to a school that owns it.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_00: So you have all these uses of that land bought by many, many different people and companies for that matter.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: So you could easily find an electrical company that happened to own Seattle Lights, can own a whole bunch of land down around Mount St.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: Helens and can log it on various occasions to try to make money from that.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it just really traces back to the ways in which land in the United States was initially surveyed and then sold by the federal government or otherwise disposed of after the federal government came on got control of that land.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: So how is the relationship then between companies like that the warehousers today and the conservationists or the the recreational outdoor people?
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's guarded, I'd say.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, yeah, because I I get that when you drive through it.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_00: Polite but tense, maybe there's a wide variety of adjectives that could be just that could be used to describe that relationship.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: Conservationists have many things that they'd still have to do with this land.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: These are issues that are still being debated on a regular basis here in Washington State.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_00: How is this particular property going to be used?
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_00: Is a company going to be allowed to clear-cut this particular place?
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: How much old growth forest will be allowed to be logged that still exists?
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: This is not so much an issue in Washington State, but it's a very much an issue in Oregon and in British Columbia and in parts of Alaska.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: We're still fighting these fights over how much old growth forests should be retained to do things like uh provide habitat for endangered, uh endangered birds.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's still a very pressing issue here on the West Coast.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I've never lived on the West Coast, so I'm a little bit ignorant of issues like that.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_02: But it's interesting to hear how the interplay differs region by region, I guess, between these different areas.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, that's one of the odd things about writing this book is I discovered that all of these things are connected to Mount St.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_00: Helens in one way or another.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: You would think of Mount St.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: Helens just as a volcano sitting out there in the middle of nowhere and it would be separated from all these issues.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_00: But it turns out when you look more deeply into it, that no, all these issues play into the history in a major way.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they certainly do.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can't you can't escape it.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when you drive, it's it goes right up to the road.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's not hidden at all.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Steve, I want to ask you about the placement of the monument.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: Or I mean, the I think it's the Johnston Ridge Monument, the visitor center there and so on.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: If you okay, you know what I'm talking about, right?
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: It seems a bit odd to me to have this monument placed right there.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's absolutely beautiful on a clear day, and they open up the curtains and it's all these windows, and you're looking right into this just amazing caldera.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_01: This is still a very much an active volcano.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I don't know.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a backstory on this?
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, is this contentious at all?
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: Or well, the history of that placement is amazing, of course.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's called the Dave Johnston Visitor Center, and the reason it has his name is because he was the USGS geologist who was stationed on that ridge just to the north of Mount St.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: Helens to monitor it.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_00: And he happened, he was the one who happened to be there on that Sunday morning at May 18th.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: That in itself is a remarkable story.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: He'd never even been there until the day before, and he wasn't supposed to be there.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: He and the other geologists had hired a graduate student to live in that trailer up on that ridge, keep an eye on the volcano, and uh issue a warning if anything happened, if there were a landslide or if there were a larger eruption than the small eruptions that had been occurring for the two months previously after Magma uh started moving around underneath Mount St.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: But it turned out that that graduate student had to be away that weekend.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_00: He was uh he had to go talk with his advisors in California.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so he asked on Saturday, can someone fill in for me on Sunday morning?
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Dave Johnson had uh been around enough dangerous volcanoes to know that being just five miles away from Mount St.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: Helens was not the safest place he could be.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_00: But he said, uh, sure, it's only for one night.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, I'd be happy to go up there and take your place on Sunday.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the reason why he was there Sunday morning.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: When the eruption happened, it probably took about 45 or 50 seconds or so for that blast to cover the five miles between the north flank of the volcano that collapsed and where Dave Johnson was standing.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: And we know, of course, that he was standing there watching it because he got on the radio and said his famous last words, Vancouver, this is it.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because that was his job.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: His job was to monitor that volcano and let the other geologists know if there was a large eruption uh that people need to be warned about.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_02: So this was how many miles away?
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_02: Five, five miles.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_02: Five miles.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_02: And what was the time that it took for the blast to go from him seeing it to we think about 45 seconds or 50 seconds?
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: The blast, he was five miles away from the peak.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: The blast sort of emerged from the flank of the volcano on the north side.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_00: So it probably only had three or four miles to go to get to him.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: But that's an indication of how fast that blast was traveling.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: It was probably going 300, 400 miles an hour as it swept out across the landscape.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's why it took those old growth trees that were six or eight feet across and just laid them flat.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_00: People have probably seen pictures of the of the forests, of the old growth forests after the eruption of Mount St.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just just remarkable.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a field of grass that has been uh that that has been sheared off.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: And you can still go there today and see those large old stumps where the trees were taken down by the eruption of Mount St.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_00: Dave Johnson and uh that trailer that he was staying in, that he and the graduate student were staying in, they were, I mean, that whole ridgeline to the north of Mount St.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_00: Helens was just swept bare and everything was thrown into the valley to the north of that ridgeline and covered by dirt.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: We've never found any trace of that trailer or Dave Johnson.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, of the 57 people, half of the bodies were never recovered.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's how uh how violent that explosion was.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, if Mount St.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: Helens were, to get back to your question question, Chris, if Mount St.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_00: Helens were acting up again, and it will, it's the most uh active volcano in the Cascades, it's only a matter of time before it erupts again.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: I certainly would not want to be on that ridgeline.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: Furthermore, there were geologists warning people before that, saying, you know, being on that ridge line, there's a there was a geologist quoted one week before the eruption saying, that's like staring down the barrel of a loaded gun standing on that ridgeline.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: That is a very dangerous place to be, and people should not be there.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: So those are the kinds of the kinds of conflict, hell, I don't know about conflicting advice, but uh people were aware that that was not a safe place to be.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_02: And it was, but it was clearly not a sort of a consensus view that it was unsafe, a very unsafe place to be.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think I think Dave Johnston was Dave Johnston was very nervous about it.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't really want to be there.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: I still can't get around the idea that we like it was still put there.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a beautiful monument and it's a beautiful visitor center, but it just doesn't make sense.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean we we look at this, Jesse.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: You and I look at this all the time.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: We we see these kinds of things that uh, you know, from a from a geoscience perspective, humans are sometimes make mistakes.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I I don't know if I'd call it a mistake, Steve, but it just seems like the placement of this is for a very active volcano, like you said, the most active in the Cascades.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's not where that's probably the last place you'd want to be.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_00: I never thought about it, to tell you the truth.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_00: That that's it's such a beautiful place and it brings home the story of the volcano so dramatically that I've that I've never thought uh I mean, one thing about Mount St.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_00: Helens is that we now know that volcanoes do give lots of warning before they erupt, and especially before they erupt explosively like this.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think the the certainly the USGS or geologists or geoscientists around the world would ever allow something like Mount St.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_00: Helens to happen again, knowingly allow something like that.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_00: For one thing, geologists were were knew far less at that time about the fact that volcanoes have a tendency to collapse from the side.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, our conception of volcanoes is that there's a crater at the top, and all of the energy is coming out of that crater and is directed straight up.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_00: Mount St.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_00: Helens was geologists' introduction, although they knew some volcanoes had acted this way previously, but only with that volcano were they shown the extent to which volcanoes can collapse and that these blasts can emerge laterally out into the landscape.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_00: But as soon as that happened with Mount St.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_00: Helens, they started looking around at other volcanoes, including volcanoes under the ocean and on other planets, and said, Oh, yeah, that's what's happened here.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because we can see all of the kinds of uh geological formations that were created by the collapse of Mount St.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_00: Helens around these other volcanoes as well.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_02: And that and that presumably has to do with the sort of landslide initially releasing pressure.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, something's got to release pressure initially to blow the top off it.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so does it probably, I'm guessing here, I don't really know, has to do with the landslide that sort of helps to trigger the eruption.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it an eruption's inevitable, but the thing, the one thing that makes it go was a landslide in this instance, right?
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: It was.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_00: It was the landslide that released this pressure that had been building up inside the volcano.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: But I think again, people assumed that that pressure was going to escape vertically into the atmosphere, and they didn't realize that it was going to sweep out laterally across the uh across the landscape.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, almost 250 square miles of forest was destroyed, and um almost everybody in that area was killed, except the people who were able to get away or who were otherwise lucky enough to not be hit with the full force of that blast as it came out of the volcano.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay, interesting.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: I was very excited to read the part in your book that you just talked about, Steve, because Jesse, I don't know if you remember when we interviewed Dr.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_01: Andy Calvert, the scientist in charge at Kelvo, um, he talked about these this hummocky terrain that they just couldn't understand uh that was around Mount Shasta.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then he referred, he said, Well, what Mount St.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_01: Helens made that make sense for us and many other places, as you as you said.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_01: But I was uh I was excited when I read that.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, I remember, I remember Andy talking about that.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_02: So, Steve, we we kind of always wrap up our interviews with a question about sort of your best day, but we're gonna again slightly modify it for you.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_02: We're geoscientists or geologists, and and so what has been your best day either writing or thinking about or interacting with the geosciences specifically?
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, my best day was climbing uh Mount St.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, toward the end of the research that I wanted to do on this book, I figured that I really should climb it.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I got a permit and chose a beautiful day to be able to make my way up the mountain.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's about a 4,000-foot climb or so.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_00: The Mount St.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_00: Helens Institute, which is a nonprofit organization that uh leads uh trips around the volcano and and does educational activities associated with the volcano, they put a volunteer up there most days of the summer.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so that volunteer is there to answer questions and make sure people don't fall off the edge of the volcano and into the crater and things like that, just keep an eye on things.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I had a wonderful conversation with that person.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: The book hadn't come out yet, but he knew quite a bit about both the geology of the volcano and about the human history of the people around that volcano.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_00: So going, it was one of the most unusual interviews I've ever done, perched on the edge of this crater at the 9,000, almost 9,000 feet up, talking with someone about topics where I would have to pull out my notebook and start jotting down notes because he was telling me such interesting things about the things that we were seeing right there in front of us.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: That was just an unforgettable day.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: Who did you climb it with?
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_00: Just by myself.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_00: I figured uh that's amazing.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, on any given day, there are maybe uh I don't know exactly how many permits there are, but maybe a hundred or hundred and fifty.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think they all they limit it to a hundred.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: A hundred, okay, yes.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_00: So a hundred.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_00: So so you're you're with plenty of other people, and that's only in the summertime, of course.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh pretty soon on Mother's Day, and that's before the permits uh go into uh into effect.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone can climb the volcano at that point, it's still early enough in the spring, it's still covered with snow.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_00: So there are hundreds of people that climb Mount St.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_00: Helens every Mother's Day, and they often do so in dresses, no matter what their gender.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: So it's quite an interesting day on the on the mountain.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's to honor all mothers.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm I might attempt to go down there and do a Mother's Day climb someday.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'll have to get a dress from my wife's too small, so I won't fit into hers.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'll need to find another one.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's hilarious.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_02: That's great.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_02: I would love to.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_02: I did not know that.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_02: Chris, let's maybe we should bucket list.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_02: That's fun here.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: Jesse, nobody wants to see you in a dress.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's that's true.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_02: It would be fun, though.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, all right.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think Steve, we've taken up enough of your time here.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_02: We've been talking with Steve Olson, author of Eruption, The Untold Story of Mount St.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_02: Helens, the book that we've kind of focused on.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_02: He has a new book out, The Apocalypse Factory, Plutonium, and the Making of the Atomic Age, which I myself am very excited to read uh in the in the coming months here.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_02: Steve, this has been a real pleasure.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_02: I I've loved this conversation.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_02: I love the book.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_02: It taught me a lot about forestry.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_02: I'd like to learn more about that.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, you frame geosciences really, really well in all of your writing.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_02: Always love talking about Mount St.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's great.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, this has been really fun.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_02: We appreciate the time.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for your time, Steve.