Strong winds and dry soils are a frightful combination.
The series of dust storms that rolled through the southern Great Plains this winter and spring were as bad as any in living memory. The region’s rainfall deficit is worse now than during the peak of the Dust Bowl, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Scenes today from southwest Kansas and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas are nearly indistinguishable from photos taken nearly 80 years ago during one of America’s worst environmental disasters.
Photo courtesy Rick Kochenower, Oklahoma Panhandle Research and Extension Center
Like a steamroller, a dust storm approaches Cimarron County in the Oklahoma Panhandle on January 12, 2014. Drought conditions this spring in the southern Great Plains are as bad in any year in living memory, prompting comparisons to the 1930s Dust Bowl. Click image to enlarge.
Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-014751
Giant dust clouds dwarf downtown streets in Elkhart, Kansas during a wind storm in May 1937. Click image to enlarge.
Photo courtesy Gary McManus
Spring dust storms this year in the southern Great Plains blew with such ferocity that they stripped bare the topsoil, revealing the clay hardpan below, seen in the foreground of this photo taken in May 2014 in Cimarron County, Oklahoma. Click image to enlarge.
Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-004051-E
A Dust Bowl farmer in Cimarron County, Oklahoma raises a fence to keep it from being buried under drifting sand in April 1936. Click image to enlarge.
Photo courtesy Nick
A tractor pauses in the field during a dust storm in May 2014 in Stevens County, Kansas. Click image to enlarge.
Photo courtesy Rick Kochenower, Oklahoma Panhandle Research and Extension Center
A January 2014 cold front pushed rolls of dust through Cimarron County, Oklahoma. Click image to enlarge.
Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-004031-E
Farm machinery is buried in blown sand in Cimarron County, Oklahoma in April 1936. Click image to enlarge.
Photo courtesy Nick
Dirt covers farm equipment in the field after a May 2014 wind storm in Stevens County, Kansas. Click image to enlarge.
Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-002505-E
Sand dunes grew almost to barn-height during storms in Liberal, Kansas in March 1936.
Click image to enlarge.
Click image to enlarge.
Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-004043-E
Sand piles up in front of an outhouse in Cimarron County, Oklahoma in April 1936. Click image to enlarge.
Photo courtesy Allen Baker, K-State Research & Extension
A brown haze filtered the sunlight as a dust storm blew across a Wichita County farm field in western Kansas on April 27, 2014. Click image to enlarge.
Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34- 018241-C
Though most houses in this farm district north of Dalhart, Texas had been abandoned by June 1938, the owners of this homestead clung to the land. Click image to enlarge.