TEXAS PANHANDLE DUST STORMS

There’s nothing like walking outside in the middle of the day and not seeing your hand in front of your face. People might be nearby and are heard, but they can’t be seen. I was a young child when I experienced a black dust storm in the Texas Panhandle. My mother soaked towels and sheets to place around the doors and windows of our house. We stayed inside until the dirt blizzard passed, but she allowed us to go outside for a brief moment. She knew that dust could kill you if you inhaled it for too long, as she had lived through the Oklahoma dust bowl of the ’30s, with the major one occurring in 1935. Many of her neighbors would die from “dust pneumonia.” People surviving the disaster called it the massive “Black Sunday” storm.

In the 1910s through the 1920s, when war raged in Europe, the Southern Plains experienced an unusually wet period. The government created a land boom in the Plains to grow more wheat, especially since grain prices were escalating. 5.2 million acres of native grassland were plowed up as newcomers rushed in to grow wheat. Native grasslands can survive drought, but wheat cannot. In the late 1920s, the area received minimal precipitation, and the wheat fields turned into dirt farms. The notorious Texas Panhandle high winds never ceased, and the drought continued, creating bare soil erosion and the perfect black storm. When all the topsoil has disappeared, and the sand has blown through, all that’s left to fly is black dirt. Three million refugees would flee the Great Plains and head to California during the 1930s. Woody Guthrie, a native of Oklahoma, lived in the Texas Panhandle in the 1930s and experienced many dirt storms. Later, he produced an album entitled “Dust Bowl Ballads.”  He eventually lost his farm to dirt, left his wife and children in the Panhandle, and fled to California to seek a living making music. Guthrie wrote, “I’ve seen the dust so black that you couldn’t see a thing,  and the wind so cold it nearly cut your water off. I’ve seen the wind so high that it blowed my fences down and buried my tractor six feet underground. Well, it turned my farm into a pile of sand. Yes, it turned my farm into a pile of sand. I had to hit the road with a bottle in my hand.”

When the drought of the 1930s finally ended, more rain and better farming techniques prevented dust storms until the 1950s, when another long drought would hit the Texas Panhandle. The last dust storm in West Texas was as recent as April. Wind speeds above 70 mph combined with low humidity and warm temperatures created the perfect condition for a dust storm. The blowing sand didn’t result in a black sky, but poor visibility caused multiple car accidents. If driving from the tip of Texas to the southern and eastern parts, we might go through a dust storm in the Panhandle of Texas, then encounter hail and driving rain an hour or two later in Central Texas and finish the day in fog in Houston. If lucky, we won’t drive through any smoke from wildfires in the drought-prone areas of South and far West Texas. It goes without saying that if we’re driving through Texas, we must be careful.