Parched US facing the spectre of a new‘dust Bowl’
Liberal, Kansas – Real estate agent Mark Faulkner recalls a day in early November when he was putting up a sign near Ulysses, Kansas, in 100kmh winds that blew up blinding dust clouds.
‘‘There were places you could not see, it was blowing so hard,’’ Faulkner said.
Over the past year or so, residents of the United States’ Great Plains have experienced storms reminiscent of the 1930s Bowl’’.
Experts say the new storms have been brought on by a combination of historic drought, a dwindling Ogallala Aquifer underground water supply, climate change, and government farm programmes.
Nearly 62 per cent of the US was gripped by drought as of December 25, and ‘‘exceptional’’ drought is enveloping parts of Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, according to the US Drought Monitor.
There is no relief in sight for the Great Plains, according to
‘‘Dust Drought Monitor forecasts, which could portend more dust clouds.
A wave of dust storms during the 1930s crippled agriculture over a vast area of the Great Plains and led to an exodus of people, many to California, dramatised in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.
While few people believe things could get that bad again, the new storms have some experts worried that similar conditions – if not the catastrophic environmental disaster of the 1930s – are returning to parts of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas and Colorado.
The Great Plains is a flat, semi- arid area with few trees, where vast herds of buffalo once thrived on native grasses. Settlers ploughed up most of the grassland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to create the wheatgrowing breadbasket of the US, encouraged by high commodity prices and free ‘‘homestead’’ land from the government.
The era known as the ‘‘Dirty 30s’’ – chronicled by Ken Burns in a Public Broadcasting Service documentary that aired in November – was when a 1930s drought gripped the Great Plains and winds carried away exposed soil in massive dust clouds.