For Jillane Hixson and her husband Dave Tzilkowski, the huge financial loss to their land, Hixson Farm four miles south of Lamar, caused by the 60 mph hurling ‘dust devil’ has left them ‘shellshocked’ and depressed’.
The couple were trapped in their home for about 15 hours from May 24 as the punishing storm rolled around them.
‘You hear sand and dirt pounding against the window,’ Hixson told The Denver Post.‘You know that it’s your crop that’s hitting the windows and blowing away, and it’s not just affecting you, but also everyone else.
‘You can’t stand to look at it. It’s like a train wreck, looking a disaster full in the face.‘At one point, the sand was pounding on the glass so hard, I didn’t know if it was hail or dirt.
As the fog of dirt seeped through cracks in the house, the couple was forced to cover their faces with handkerchiefs.
‘It was in your nose, on your tongue, in your eyes,’ Hixson said.
They went to bed at 11 p.m, putting their heads under the blankets to shield them from the noise and the dirt.
The storm had passed by the next morning, but three-foot drifts of dirt covered everything.
Twenty-seven vehicles slammed into each other during a sandstorm in rural Northern Nevada, killing one person, seriously injuring several others and sapping already-thin emergency resources Monday evening, officials said.
Humboldt County sheriff’s dispatchers called in virtually every medical, law enforcement and fire worker in the sparsely populated area after drivers reported “near-apocalyptic” conditions on Interstate 80 three miles west of Winnemucca, according to officials at the Humboldt General Hospital.
The amount of dust being blown across the landscape has increased over the last 17 years in large swaths of the West, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder. The escalation in dust emissions — which may be due to the interplay of several factors, including increased windstorm frequency, drought cycles and changing land-use patterns — has implications both for the areas where the dust is first picked up by the winds and for the places where the dust is put back down.
Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That’s all we can do.
Even more worrisome, the draining of the High Plains water account has picked up speed. The average annual depletion rate between 2000 and 2007 was more than twice that during the previous fifty years. The depletion is most severe in the southern portion of the aquifer, especially in Texas, where the water table beneath sizeable areas has dropped 100-150 feet; in smaller pockets, it has dropped more than 150 feet.
But University of Regina paleoclimatologist Jeannine-Marie St. Jacques says that decade-long drought is nowhere near as bad as it can get.
St. Jacques and her colleagues have been studying tree ring data and, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Vancouver over the weekend, she explained the reality of droughts.
“What we’re seeing in the climate records is these megadroughts, and they don’t last a decade—they last 20 years, 30 years, maybe 60 years, and they’ll be semi-continental in expanse,” she told the Regina Leader-Post by phone from Vancouver.
“So it’s like what we saw in the Dirty Thirties, but imagine the Dirty Thirties going on for 30 years. That’s what scares those of us who are in the community studying this data pool.”
