Dust Bowl days still linger

[franksolich]

http://www.omaha.com/article/20121117/LIVING/711179948/1707#dust-bowl-days-still-linger

--somewhere in Nebraska--



--Omaha, Nebraska--

Dust Bowl days still linger

The Dust Bowl changed the kitchen routine after meals at the Baldwin house on North Main Street in Ainsworth, Neb.

After washing dishes with water heated on a cast-iron stove, Elsie Baldwin set them to dry on a drain board before returning them to the kitchen's small drop-leaf table and placing them upside down.

The glasses and crockery ware were clean and ready to be turned right-side up for the next meal.

If the dishes were stored in the kitchen's floor-to-ceiling cupboard, there was a good chance that a layer of dust — which seemed to always hang in the north-central Nebraska community's air — would coat them within hours.

It's been eight decades since the severe dust storms that roiled up out of the Great Plains during the 1930s gave a name and identity to a decade of depression, drought and despair.

The Dust Bowl was the largest man-made natural disaster in history. It was both an era and an area.....

.....The Baldwins draped damp sheets over windows in their house to trap infiltrating dirt. If sheets turned black, they knew dirt had drifted south from the Dakotas. If they were red, the dirt had come north from Oklahoma.....

.....Nebraska had record-setting dryness from January through October. Omaha recorded its hottest summer this year. Iowa's summer was the second driest and 10th warmest.

And less than four weeks ago, hurricane-force winds swept across the plains, fanning wildfires, spawning tornadoes and stirring up a dust cloud — visible from space — stretching from Nebraska to Oklahoma.....

.....Osborn, 83, is a volunteer National Weather Service observer who remembers dirt clouds blowing into his hometown from the south that obscured the town like a fog during the 1930s.

“It just seeped in on everything,” he said. “It even got into boxes of dry cereal.”....