Return of the Dusters

The sky over Chicago turned an eerie shade of yellow-brown one afternoon last week, and a menacing twilight fell over the Loop--powdery topsoil, blown in from the Great Plains, was drifting once more in the upper atmosphere. It was a fearful reminder that the flatlands of the midcontinent, which had a green and healing decade of rain in the 19405, are dry again. This spring dust storms such as have not been seen since the "black blizzards" of the 19303 are blowing in the Southwest, in western Kansas, in areas of Nebraska, Missouri, Wyoming and Colorado.

Choked Throats. As the dusters sweep in, visibility sometimes falls to zero. During bad storms, traffic ceases, lights go on in such hard-hit towns as Garden City, Kans. or Lubbock, Texas. Farmers and townspeople seek shelter and wait while dust seeps remorselessly through every crack of window and door and drifts in the fields and streets outside.

In eastern Colorado thousands of miles of fences are down--pushed over by drifting sand. Mudballs form over the eyes of cattle, and wild geese fall dead with their bills and throats packed with dirt. At Field, N. Mex. (pop. 25), a dust storm halted the funeral of 73-year-old Mrs. Alice Towner, who had walked toward her mailbox in a previous storm, been swallowed by the blinding dust, wandered lost and helpless, and finally died in a nearby pasture. Oklahoma City's Engineer W. W. Baker estimated that one storm last week deposited 185,000 tons of dust on the city, enough to fill its 6,000-seat municipal auditorium to the rafters.

The damage is already tremendous. Great acreages of winter wheat in the worst dust areas are already ruined--drifted under or simply pulled out of the loose ground by winds. Pasture lands have disappeared under drifting silt or have been spotted with hummocks of tumbleweed and mounded dirt. Ponds have filled, roads have disappeared.

The wreckage of fields is only one aspect of the drought. Almost everywhere in the drought area and in many peripheral regions the water table has dropped alarmingly. Thousands of wells have run dry. In Missouri as in many a nearby state water is being hauled in trucks, tank cars and barrels from more fortunate spots. The drought has even affected cities. Some residents of Oklahoma City are drilling wells in their yards as insurance against shortage, and many houses in St. Louis and Kansas City are settling and cracking in the ash-dry earth.

New Cycle. The dust storms of the south plains had their beginnings when the sod was first broken by homesteaders' plows in the late iSoos; the first U.S. dust bowl developed in Thomas County, Kans. in 1912. The development of the tractor, the rainy years between 1914 and 1931 and high prices for farmers' crops caused a tremendous increase in plowing. Millions of acres of sandy or submarginal land were planted to wheat, corn and cotton. Amid the droughts of the 19305, the coverless, powder-dry earth of the plains lay helpless under the scouring winds. During World War II, heavy rainfall and high prices brought a repetition of the cycle; once more millions of marginal acres were plowed and planted by "suitcase farmers" intent on a fast dollar.

A four-year cycle of drought, which began in 1950, was hardly noticed at first; the borders of the drought area varied from year to year because of local weather conditions. In parts of Iowa, Indiana, Missouri and Illinois, for instance, rainfall has been far below normal, yet still far above that of the Southwest. But in the five most affected states (see map), the earth has grown drier every year. Parts of Texas, between the Red River and the weakly trickling Rio Grande, has gotten less than 10% of normal rainfall for four years; southwestern Oklahoma has gotten little more, and areas of Colorado, Kansas, Arizona and New Mexico have suffered dangerous drought. In all of them last week, not only the topsoil but the subsoil was parched deep down.

Windy Battle. In areas of deep soil that has had good care, even this has not yet proven disastrous. In the last two decades man has learned to battle the wind: by planting windbreaks and cover crops, by contour plowing to keep precious moisture in the soil, by use of the double-mouldboard lister plow, which ridges the ground and slows down wind action, by "chiseling" the earth with a spike-toothed Hoeme's* plow, which brings clods of subsoil to the surface.

But even these tactics failed against this year's winds--far stronger than the winds of the 19303. Week after week gales of 60, 70 and 80 miles an hour scourged the earth. In the Oklahoma panhandle alone there were 499,000 acres of land that either I) lost at least one inch of topsoil, or 2) been covered with from one to two inches of windblown dust and sand.

Many a state now has soil-conservation laws that permit authorities to "list" or "chisel" the uncared-for land and tax its owner for the expense. All over the plains last week the fight against soil erosion was going on. But such work--and particularly the job of getting grass back on thin, bad soil--would take time. Only soaking rains could guarantee an end to the blowing plumes of dust.

*Devised in 1935 by a German immigrant farmer named Fred Hoeme after he discovered that an area of his Oklahoma dust-bowl farm which had been torn by some heavy road machinery was the only section on which he could grow a crop.

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