It's been a bad spring for environmental disasters in the American heartland. A series of tornadoes cut a swath across the South, killing as many as 350 people in seven states. Cities and towns are now being threatened with massive flooding by the Mississippi River. Given today's 24-hour news cycle, the desperation of our fellow Americans' situations enters our homes every day with great urgency. Tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, oil spills.

But no dust bowls.


Black Sunday and the Dust Bowl have been largely forgotten even in our own country, where the environmental catastrophes we remember most today are the most recent: Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Both have been called our nation's worst environmental disaster in one forum or another.

New Orleans is still recovering from Katrina, and the BP oil spill's ultimate effects can't be known yet — although President Obama, speaking in Panama City Beach this past August, declared the oil spill to be the nation's worst "natural" disaster.

It's hard to see, however, how either Katrina or the oil spill can top the Dust Bowl in the pantheon of American environmental disasters. In the Dust Bowl, about 7,000 people, men, women and especially small children lost their lives to "dust pneumonia." At least 250,000 people fled the Plains. Some who remained ate Russian thistle, an unwanted stowaway in bags of wheat seeds brought by Volga German refugees from Russia. Thistle grows from green shoots into what is known in the Western United States as tumbleweeds.

Residents crawled to safety in the dust (summer) storms and "snust" (winter) storms. Many towns were abandoned.

As Timothy Egan records in his National Book Award-winning "The Worst Hard Time," many in the East did not believe the first accounts of the Dust Bowl until a May 1934 storm carried soil from the Plains over much of the nation. In Chicago, 12 million tons of dust fell. New York (where the dust dimmed the city for five hours), Washington (as FDR was holding meetings in the White House on the Dust Bowl), and ships at sea, 300 miles off the Atlantic coast, were covered in Great Plains topsoil. "Cattle went blind and suffocated. When farmers cut them open, they found stomachs stuffed with fine sand. . . . The instinctive act of hugging a loved one or shaking someone's hand could knock two people down, for the static electricity from the dusters was so strong," Egan documents.


Through the prism of modern media, we learn of the ancillary costs — alcoholism, suicide, divorce and domestic violence — caused by contemporary disasters. We can't know what sort of psychological problems were caused by the Dust Bowl.

"In no other instance was there greater or more sustained damage to the American land," writes historian Donald Worster, author of the 1979 history, "Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s."

After Black Sunday, a Roosevelt administration official urging Congress to act on conservation measures said 100 million acres of the Plains had lost most of their topsoil and about half of that land "was essentially destroyed," never to be useable as farmland again.



In a distant, distorted mirror to today's talk of climate change, the Department of Agriculture promoted the idea that land turned over to crops was changing the rainfall patterns on the Southern Plains, drawing more water out of the atmosphere.


The ensuing drought and depression were the final pieces of the puzzle. One in four Americans was unemployed, and farmers couldn't afford to plant all the land that had been shorn of its natural grasses. Throw in wind, a constant on the High Plains (area wind-power proponents have called the Plains "the Saudi Arabia of Wind") and the Dust Bowl was on, blowing topsoil far and wide, forcing farmers to leave their houses and aspiring farmers to flee newly built dugouts on their new homesteads.

The United States has experienced other terrible environmental disasters: About 10,000 people died in the Galveston hurricane of 1900, according to Erik Larson, author of "Issac's Storm," and the city never recovered its former glory as the principal city of south Texas. A hurricane in 1928 hit Florida's Lake Okeechobee area, killing about 2,500 people, officials now estimate. As for Hurricane Katrina, it put about 80 percent of New Orleans under water and killed about 1,800 people while causing $200 billion in damage.



It was only later, after I had seen pictures of the storms of the '30s, sometimes called "black blizzards" as well as "dusters," and read Egan's book, that it became apparent the Dust Bowl had made a curtain call that week in the fall of 1956, during a later period of drought on the Plains. As in the '30s, farmers had been seduced by a cycle of opulent rainfall and high commodity prices into turning over more topsoil than was prudent. When the inevitable dry spell and decline in the commodity market came, all that was needed to achieve liftoff for the sproutless soil was a wind of about 30 mph.

