I always thought dust bowls were ended after the great depression? They were called the dirty thirties for a reason. I saw a documentary on History about them. Farmers needed to use guide ropes to walk from their house to the barn. Dust blew right into their homes through the walls. They had to cover their faces to keep from breathing in the dust. A dust storm traveled all the way to Washington DC in March 1935.
That lead to land management reforms and erosion control programs. They’ve been quite effective. I’ve never heard of a dust storm before in my lifetime. Until today. Whats weird is its been raining a lot in Texas and Arkansas the past couple months. We had six inches of rain three weeks ago. Its raining hard at my house right now.
Some of it is attributed to the tearing down of the shelterbelts that were created during the '30’s to cut the wind erosion. Also the tilling of every inch of tillable land and not leaving cover crops. In some respects, we’ve gone somewhat backward in land management. There’s also the removal from and tilling of land that was once in CRP.
The dust storm that hit Washington was quite fortuitous. Up till then, “it was somebody elses problem” but seeing Washington hit made even the politicians recognize this was a national problem that had to be addressed by land management reforms.
I guess dust storms still happen in the desert. I’ve never seen any news reports of them reappearing in Oklahoma, Arkansas. or Texas before. Until today.
We have dust storms in Arizona. They even run public service ads on the tube telling you what to do if you’re driving and you’re caught in a dust storm.
What do you do? My reaction would be to stop the car and turn it so the motor was away from the direction the storm was coming and roll up all the windows.
The ads say to pull over to the right as far off the road as you can, roll up the windows, put on your flashers, shut off your engine, and sit and wait for the storm to pass. It seems to me that moving the car around unnecessarily would be the worst thing to do in a dust storm where other drivers on the road couldn’t see you.
My wife reminded me our troops dealt with dust storms during the Iraq offensive. Our troops got attacked hard during one Iraqi counteroffensive because they knew our planes were grounded.
Dust storms in the depression era Midwest were different from desert dust storms. Midwest storms were caused by very dumb farming methods. Plowing up too much land. Not leaving any ground cover. Today farmers rotate the crops they plant. Sometimes they’ll use a field to harvest hay or plant clover. Clover adds nitrogen to soil. Its a bad idea to ever leave the land stripped bare for very long. You can lose the top soil quickly and whats left behind isn’t much good for growing crops.
I wonder how many car’s paint jobs gets ruined in dust storms? A sandblaster can strip a car’s finish to bare metal. I know a dust storm doesn’t blow that hard (it would injure people if it did). But theres got to be some scratches in the paint.
Not a dust storm but my parents car was totally ruined in a sand storm in Nevada. On topic, I remember a dust storm in what had to be the mid 1940s in Texas (Dallas County). I remember my mother putting wet towels on window and door sills; scared me silly even though she was laughing about it—or maybe laughing at me for being scared.
Growing up in the Midwest in he '60s, we’d have a small dust storm every spring when the farmers plowed under the old or cover crops in anticipation of planting. They weren’t on the scale of the Arizona or Nevada ones, of course, or even the occasional ones we get here in Colorado, but they were a once-a-year event. You’d be in a bad spot if you’d left a window open
that day. You’d come home to find an inch or so of dust/dirt on any surface near the window.
Beyond that annual event, the farmers in the area did a fine job of keeping their fields covered and managed to prevent the kind of erosion experienced in the '30s that people in my area still remembered even in the 60s.
The news makes a BIIIIG deal about them.
I always roll my eyes - it’s just dust. They blow though in 1/2 hour, sometimes rip off a few roofs in the low-rent-district (you know who you are…), and mess up your freshly washed car.
It is true that the zero visibility on the freeway can be exciting, but that doesn’t happen that often.
In some areas of the Intermountain West, dust storms have become more common due to dryland wheat farming on land better left alone.
In dryland wheat farming, you grow a crop one year and leave it fallow the next. So you have from fall to spring a year and a half later with nothing on the soil. If the top soil starts to blow off, then nothing can easily grow on it, so it’s left bare and more (poorer) soil blows, etc.
Of course the dirt settles somewhere else and that farmer has trouble growing wheat, dominoes ensue.
This. I’ve made trips to Mojavia a couple of times and had to deal with dust/sand storms lasting 2 or three days. However they were prevented from just blowing and sprawling all over the place by the terrain also.
In a way it was kind of weird, drive veeeerrryyy slllloooowwwwlllyyyy for an hour or so, then in the space of 20 feet? 30 feet? something like that, to just drive out of it and be able to turn around and watch this wall of dust and sand blowing by, while knowing that in a few hours I had to drive back into that because that’s where my base and team were.