Drought and Dust Storms
The unusually wet period, which encouraged increased settlement and cultivation in the Great Plains, ended in 1930. This was the year in which an extended and severe drought began which caused crops to fail, leaving the plowed fields exposed to wind erosion. The fine soil of the Great Plains was easily eroded and carried east by strong continental winds.
On November 11, 1933, a very strong dust storm stripped topsoil from desiccated South Dakota farmlands in just one of a series of bad dust storms that year. Then, beginning on May 9, 1934, a strong, two-day dust storm removed massive amounts of Great Plains topsoil in one of the worst such storms of the Dust Bowl. The dust clouds blew all the way to Chicago, where they deposited 12 million pounds of dust. Two days later, the same storm reached cities in the east, such as Buffalo, Boston, Cleveland, New York City, and Washington, D.C. That winter (1934–1935), red snow fell on New England.
On April 14, 1935, known as "Black Sunday", 20 of the worst "black blizzards" occurred throughout the Dust Bowl, causing extensive damage and turning the day to night; witnesses reported they could not see five feet in front of them at certain points. The term Dust Bowl was first used in print to describe this storm by Associated Press reporter Robert E. Geiger.
Read more about this topic: Dust Bowl
Famous quotes containing the words drought and, drought, dust and/or storms:
“A worm is as good a traveler as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As the fields fear drought in autumn, so people fear poverty in old age.”
—Chinese proverb.
“These, and such as these, must be our antiquities, for lack of human vestiges. The monuments of heroes and the temples of the gods which may once have stood on the banks of this river are now, at any rate, returned to dust and primitive soil. The murmur of unchronicled nations has died away along these shores, and once more Lowell and Manchester are on the trail of the Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“An old man, broken with the storms of state,
Is come to lay his weary bones among ye:
Give him a little earth for charity.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)