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Black Duster
Mon Nov 29, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton, and this is The Weather Notebook. Today, Texas commentator
Bill Clough remembers back nearly half a century, when a black wall roared out of the
western sky:
BC: Most tourists pass through Amarillo, Texas, en route to Colorado, but not on April
8th of 1956. At 5 o’clock that Sunday, a visitor from Colorado slammed into town with
70 mph winds: a black duster.
BC: In 30 minutes, visibility was zero—and stayed there for four hours over all the
Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. Highway traffic was halted. Authorities couldn’t
communicate because their radios were designed to transmit through air, not dirt.
Later, they tried opening the roads: Seven accidents in as many minutes--including a
crash that killed three people from California on Highway 66.
BC: The next morning, what the local Weather Bureau station would call the worst
duster in 20 years was not over. At 8 o’clock--time to go to school--the sky, just on the
edge of discernibility, glowed a dull red. At Stephen F. Austin Jr. High School, like
someone throwing a toggle switch, the dust suddenly passed. We blinked in dazzling
sunlight. Overhead, what looked like nimbus clouds floating over the trees were soil,
solid black. Dr. Barry Keim is the Louisiana State Climatologist in Baton Rouge, where
the area’s records are kept:
BK: "The storm eroded 95-thousand acres of land that had not been eroded before
during the year. That’s a direct quote from the climatological data of 1956. That was
written by Lucius W. Dye."
BC: Most histories say the Dust Bowl ended in 1939. Not in Amarillo, when
95-thousand acres of Colorado paid a call, 17 years later.
Bill Clough is the news director at South Texas Public Radio. The Weather Notebook is
a production of the Mount Washington Observatory, supported by Subaru of America.
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