When it comes right down to 'who lives and who dies' the morning of the eruption, the mountain was remarkably fickle. Some people camping very close to the mountain survive, thanks to an intervening hill which provided some shelter from the pyroclastic flow; others farther away but with a clear view to the volcano die almost instantly. Some campers manage to hike out of the transformed landscape; returning after the eruption, they find that their friends were killed when a log fell on their tent, but the dogs with them somehow survived unscathed. Two men are riding horses; one takes shelter in a cave and dies; the other dives into a river as the explosion passes overhead, hikes several miles toward a nearby town ... and then dies anyway, unable to find help.
Irony abounds in the story of a conservation group lobbying to save old-growth forest from logging. A few days before the eruption, they lead a hike through a certain section of untouched forest, hoping to persuade the government to declare it a preserve, off-limits to loggers, so that future generations can see its virgin beauty. In seconds, the eruption flattens each and every one of those ancient trees far more completely than any logging company. (The conservation group switches to support preserving the destroyed forest as a historical site after the eruption so that the power of the volcano can be seen and appreciated.)
If you're interested in Mount Saint Helens or natural disasters in general, this is an enjoyable read, but the author reaches a bit, in my opinion, to find an axe to grind and a handful of villains to point to. The governor of Washington state at the time comes off very poorly in his telling, and she may well deserve to.
Olson's attempt to paint the CEO of the Weyerhaeuser logging company as a bad guy is less successful. Much is made of the company's refusal to stop operations in the area before the eruption, but as even the author admits, the wholly-inadequate designated "safe zones" were drawn up by government officials, not the company. In addition, one has to remember that no one knew when, or if, the volcano would actually erupt. It had been threatening for two months. If the company had idled its workers for that long, wouldn't it have been the target of complaints for an abundance of caution, depriving families in an economically-depressed area of income, particularly if the eruption had, as it could well have, turned out to be less dramatic than it did?
In any case, the Sunday morning eruption spared the lives of many men who would have died if the volcano had blown during a working day, a fact for which we can be thankful. George Weyerhaeuser did not speak to the book's author about the disaster, but despite Olson's best efforts to paint Capitalism Red in Tooth and Claw, he comes across as a decent guy: his company gave the father of a man considered dead but whose body was never found two years off with pay to try to locate his son's remains.
The reality of the situation is that, despite humanity's best efforts, natural disasters happen. It's hard to say what anyone in authority "should have" done to make things better, without a timetable of exactly when it was going to happen, how bad it would be, and which areas would be affected, things no one could possibly know. It's worth pointing out that one of the first people to die was a scientist at an observation station directly in the path of the explosion: if "more science" were the answer, one would think that the scientists wouldn't have put their own in harm's way. There are no fingers to point here.
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