If you were alive on Sunday, May 18, 1980, you probably remember where you were and what you were doing when you heard that Mount St. Helens had erupted. The eruption killed 57 people, caused billions of dollars' worth of damage, closed highways and airports, and took 1,300 feet off the Washington volcano's elevation.

Now Steve Olson, a Seattle-based writer and the author of "Mapping Human History," has published "Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens," in which he lays out the economic, historic and cultural forces that influenced the fates of those near the mountain that day. W.W. Norton & Company will release the book March 7.

Steve Olson is an award-winning science writer.

Olson will visit Portland to read from his book at 7:30 p.m. March 9 at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St. Here is an excerpt.

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"Eruption" has received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews.

Book critic Michael Upchurch interviews author Steve Olson and reviews "Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens.

Right after lunchtime on Thursday (Editor's note: March 27, 1980), people near Mount St. Helens heard a loud bang from the cloud-covered volcano. A few hours later, a reporter from a Portland radio station was flying over the mountain when the clouds suddenly parted and revealed a plume of steam and ash rising from the mountain's summit. "There is no question at all," he radioed to his listeners. "Volcanic activity has begun. You can see smoke and ash pouring from the top of the mountain, especially the north side of the mountain." A blackened crater 250 feet across had opened on the top of the mountain and was showering ash on the mountain's northeast side. Officials from the Washington Department of Emergency Services told everyone within fifteen miles of the volcano that they should leave the area.

The area around Mount St. Helens is not heavily populated--at least not at the end of March, when the lakes surrounding the mountain are still frozen and the ridgelines remain covered by snow. All around the volcano, narrow valleys, steep hillsides, and dense forests have discouraged human settlement. To the northwest, the nearest town is Toutle, twenty-eight miles away. (The name is from a band of Native Americans who lived in the area before the arrival of American settlers.) To the southwest, the nearest towns are Cougar and Yale, which serve mostly to provision people working, camping, fishing, and hunting in the nearby forests. East of the volcano the country is even more wild and is mostly included within the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.

But the area around Mount St. Helens was not devoid of people when the volcano began shaking. Every weekday, hundreds of loggers employed by the Weyerhaeuser Company were working in the woods around the mountain. Weyerhaeuser owned most of the land between Mount St. Helen and Interstate 5, thirty-five miles to the west, and for the previous eight decades it had been logging that land hard. Most of the original forests were gone, replaced by muddy clearcuts and even stands of hand-planted trees. But right around Mount St. Helens some of the old-growth forests still stood--gigantic trees 10 or more feet across and more than 250 feet tall, monsters that shook the ground so hard when they fell that loggers nearby could barely remain standing. In the spring of 1980, Weyerhaeuser was chopping down its last remaining stands of these trees. To the west and northwest of the volcano, the woods were filled with logging roads and yarding towers.

When the volcano erupted Thursday afternoon, Weyerhaeuser evacuated three hundred of its employees from the area. For many loggers, it was a chance to retreat to their favorite bars in Toledo, Vader, and Castle Rock an hour or two early. At the Hill Billy Inn, the girlfriend of a logger was quoted in the Portland Oregonian saying, "The mountain is blowing, and this tavern is going." But their time off was brief--as one company official scoffed, "There's no concern of any immediate danger at all." By the next morning, they were all back at work.

Thursday morning, a television station in Seattle had offered (volcanologist) Steve Malone a helicopter ride to the volcano in exchange for an interview. Malone was too busy, so he asked (fellow volcanologist David) Johnston if he wanted to go. Johnston was so nervous about public speaking that he once hyperventilated and passed out while giving a scientific talk, but this offer was too good to turn down. He drove to the helicopter pad, shook hands with the journalists, and took off.

The helicopter carrying Johnston and the reporters landed in the Timberline parking lot on the north flank of the volcano. Timberline was the end of the road to Mount St. Helens--a broad paved area just above the volcano's highest grove of trees for drivers who wanted to get as close to the summit as possible. From the parking lot, nothing but glaciers and snowfields stood between the reporters clustered around Johnston and the mountain's peak. The afternoon was bright but cold. Wind-driven snow needled their faces.

"Magma is rising," he told the assembled reporters in the parking lot beneath Mount St. Helens. "It looks like there's a very good chance there will be an eruption. If there is an explosion, it is possible that very, very hot incandescent debris could come down on all sides." To the reporters filming Johnston and taking down notes, the incongruity of what he was saying was obvious. He was talking about all of them dying in a devastating eruption. Yet he was obviously excited to be so close to an active volcano.

Excerpt from "Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens" by Steve Olson. Copyright (c) 2016 by Steve Olson. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.