Mount St Helens Eruption Research Paper

On May 18, 1980 Mount St. Helens erupted. The volcano, located in southwestern Washington was about 9,600 feet above sea level. The eruption removed 1,300 feet off the summit. Along with the volcano, a lot of lands was destroyed. Today the land is healing but the landscape has been permanently altered. There was also human losses. Fifty-seven people died and more than 200 homes were destroyed. In the decades after the eruption, most of the healing has been done. But how much damage did the eruption actually cause? In the next few paragraphs, I will discuss the volcanoes impact on the human population of that area. After the volcano erupted, debris avalanche, mudflows, and other natural disasters caused extensive damage to land and civil works. More than 200 houses and cabins were destroyed and many more were damaged surrounding counties, leaving many people homeless. Many tens of thousands of acres of prime forest, as well as recreational sites, bridges, roads, and trails, were destroyed or heavily damaged. More than 185 miles of highways and roads and 15 miles of railways were destroyed or extensively damaged. Trees amounting to more than 4 billion board feet of salable …show more content…
Many crops survived, however, in areas blanketed by only a thin covering of ash. In the long term, the ash may provide beneficial chemical nutrients to the soils of eastern Washington. The ash fall, however, did pose some temporary problems for transportation operations and for sewage-disposal and water-treatment systems.Visibility was greatly decreased during the ash fall, because of this many highways and roads were closed to traffic, some only for a few hours, but others for weeks. Air transportation was disrupted for a few days to 2 weeks as several airports in eastern Washington shut down due to ash accumulation and attendant poor visibility. Over a thousand commercial flights were canceled following airport