Return Of The Dust Bowl

Not that Mr Vannatta, 92 – or his neighbour Huston Hanes – needs reminding. Both retired farmers, they are members of a very small club indeed: the last survivors of that great American epic, the Dust Bowl, that spanned 1932 to 1936 and coincided with the Great Depression.

Mr Vannatta found the dust on rafters in an old barn 10 years ago and knew at once what it was. When the storms they called “dusters” roared through, vacuuming whole fields to the heavens, this is the dust they left behind, choking the lungs of grown men and burying trees to their highest limbs.

Brought together by a reporter, the two neighbours in Keyes, a small and parched farming town in the Oklahoma Panhandle, ponder not just the past, but also the present. Drought is again stalking the Panhandle, a two-by-four stick of territory on the map so flat and so lonely that it goes by the name “No Man’s Land”. It has been more like a furnace here of late than either can remember, more even than when the dusters came. And they both agree the Dust Bowl, or something close to it, could happen again.

“We would have hot days, of course,” says Mr Hanes, his hands wider than a baseball glove, as he recalls the Dust Bowl, an environmental catastrophe that would be blamed not just on the perniciousness of nature but also on the greed of men. It followed the wheat rush of the late 1920s when farmers ripped up millions of acres of buffalo grass and left loose topsoil exposed. “Those days were hot, but…”

They nod at one another. The recent string of afternoons when the thermometer has broken through 100 degrees Fahrenheit (nearly 38C) here is something new.
 

Read more here: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/return-of-the-dust-bowl-8031932.html