"Around noon on January 21, 1932, a cloud ten thousand feet high from ground to top appeared just outside Amarillo...Nobody knew what to call it. It was not a rain cloud. Nor was it a cloud holding ice pellets. It was not a twister. It was thick like course animal hair; it was alive. People close to it described a feeling of being in a blizzard--a black blizzard, they called it--with an edge like steel wool. The weather bureau people in Amarillo were fascinated by the cloud precisely because it defied explanation...”

Primary Area’s of Impact

Causes of the Dust Bowl: - Extreme drought - Missuse of the land that took all of the nutrients out of it - Static electricity

"Every school in [Baca] county was closed for a week in March. At one school, children were trapped just before the afternoon school bell, unable to go home. They spent the night holed up behind the thin walls of the wood-frame building, cold and hungry. Stories like that made parents give up on school. It was too risky, and they did not see any reason for it. Life's ambitions and dreams had dried up; people held to a few, desperate desires--a longing to breathe clean air, to eat, to stay warm. School was a luxury."

"Dr John H. Blue of Cuymon, Oklahoma, said he treated fifty-six patients for dust pneumonia, and all of them showed signs of silicosis; others were suffering early symptoms of tuberculosis. He was blunt. The doctor had looked inside an otherwise healthy young farm hand, a man in his early twenties, and told him what he saw. 'You are filled with dirt,' the doctor said. The young man died within a day."

"Desperate parents pleaded with the government men to help their families escape. Their children were being strangled by dust. In a month, a hundred families in Baca County gave up their property to the government in return for passage away from land that was killing them."

Migration: U.S. Route 66

Hoovervilles: Shanty towns built by the homeless

These could be found across the US

The Face of Economic Poverty

Could anything similar to this ever happen again?

Phoenix, Arizona: 2011

Known as a Haboob, and comes before thunderstorms

Video from the History Channel

What did Chicago and New York Experience?

What other names did the Dust Bowl/Dust Storms have?

What do you think is the most important thing to remember about the Dust Bowl?