Dust Bowl

After living in Glendale 20 years, paying taxes, being respectful citizens of the community, we are now subjected to living in a "dust bowl." We realize we cannot stop progress, but when is the City of Glendale going to wake up to the fact that you are overbuilding apartments and condominiums. Have our city fathers stopped to anticipate our traffic problems, power usage, pollution, parking, etc.? In the square block bounded by Palm Drive, Columbus Avenue, Pacific Avenue and Stocker Street, there are under construction four buildings, with two more due to start this month.

Even by Texas standards the dark, dense, 8,000-foot-high behemoth of a dust storm that enveloped Lubbock had folks making comparisons Tuesday to the great Dust Bowl of the 1930s. It was "Steinbeck-ish in its arrival," said 71-year-old Paul Beane, a Lubbock city councilman, who watched the storm roll in Monday evening from his front porch. "I expected at any moment to see a line of Model Ts coming through headed to California. It really did look like pictures I had seen of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

The continental U.S. endured the hottest summer this year since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and the second-warmest since recordkeeping began more than a century ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. A July heat wave that set more than 2,300 daily records across the nation and 50 all-time records contributed to an average temperature between June and August of 74.5 degrees Fahrenheit. That's just shy of the 1936 record of 74.

The wind in West Texas is famously powerful and incessant. But this year, more big blows than anyone can remember have roared through, stripping away precious topsoil and carrying off another season of hope for farmers and ranchers. Everywhere, it seems, the land is on the move: sand building up in corners of the just-swept front porch and coating clean laundry on the line, dust up your nose and in crevices of farm machinery. Drive along unpaved county roads and the farmers' plight becomes clear: Wind rakes the surface, scouring sand into adjacent fields, sweeping into farmers' deeply tilled furrows.

The "dust bowl" on Western Avenue in Rancho Palos Verdes has been brought under control, a city official said last week. About 110,000 cubic yards of soil are being removed from a hillside that will be terraced for new buildings at the old Harbor Heights shopping center at Caddington Drive. The center is being refurbished and expanded by a Denver developer.

Culture shocks don't come much more shocking than the Klezmatics' juxtaposition of "Ilse Koch," a searing dirge detailing concentration camp horrors, and a frisky holiday ditty called "Hanuka Tree" at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Monday. It's also jarring to realize that both songs' lyrics were written by Woody Guthrie, a musician generally associated with "This Land Is Your Land" and Dust Bowl ballads.

Almost every day, it seems, another one passes away. More often than not, the capsule newspaper obituaries only hint at their participation in the American epic that was the Dust Bowl exodus: "He grew up in eastern Oklahoma," goes a typical passage, clipped from the Bakersfield Californian a few years ago, "and came to California in 1938 as a farm worker. From Porterville in the San Joaquin Valley to Santa Paula in Ventura County, Eldon picked lemons, olives, cherries, grapes and cotton."

I'd rather drink muddy water Sleep out in a hollow log Than be in California Treated like a dirty dog. * This is what the migrants sang in the 1930s, when the Golden State was anything but welcoming to the "tired and poor" masses heading this way from Dust Bowl-ravaged states. For a few months in 1936, the Los Angeles Police Department launched a foreign excursion of sorts -- a "Bum Blockade" on the state's borders.

Suppose your family lost its home and had to pack up everything and drive across the country looking for a new place to live and work. That happened to farmers in America more than 70 years ago. The rain stopped, the wind came up and the soil blew away. They called it the Great Dust Bowl. A million people left their farms and drove west in search of a better life. Many came to California and settled at Weedpatch Camp, a government camp set up for them near Bakersfield.

The terrible drought that forced a half-million desperate farmers and their families to migrate to California from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and Missouri in the 1930s was vividly recalled at a Dust Bowl Days reunion here recently. Several hundred people--including many who lived through the wrenching experience, and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren--spent the day in Lamont Park renewing acquaintances, looking at old photographs, exchanging stories.

This city was branded 15 years ago by a man who drove a rental truck carrying nearly 5,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer to a federal building and lit a fuse. Because of him, when people said "Oklahoma City," the word that followed was "bombing." To many, it still does. "That's the first thing I thought of," said Bryan McSween, a FEMA employee who recently moved here from Northridge, Calif. New York and New Orleans had catastrophes, but they had celebrated identities, too. Oklahoma City didn't.

You wake up in the morning to find your nostrils clogged. Houses and trees have vanished beneath a choking brown smog. A hot wind blasts fine particles through doors and windows, coating everything in sight and imparting an eerie orange glow. Dust storms are a routine experience in Iraq, but lately they've become a whole lot more common.

For nearly three years, farmer Sarheed Ahmed barely touched his land. He was too afraid of drawing the attention of the masked gunmen who terrorized the area, or of the U.S. attack helicopters that prowled overhead. Now, Ahmed says, he can farm until late at night without worrying about safety. But in a cruel twist, the rain didn't come this season.

Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, "the Okie poet" with the down-home style whose writings reflected the lives of her brethren, Dust Bowl migrants who came to Central California during the Great Depression, has died. She was 88. McDaniel, who also was the poet laureate of Tulare, Calif., died April 13 of complications related to old age at a Tulare rest home, said her friend Katherine Andes.

The driest periods of the last century -- the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the droughts of the 1950s -- may become the norm in the Southwest United States within decades because of global warming, according to a study released Thursday. The research suggests that the transformation may already be underway. Much of the region has been in a severe drought since 2000, which the study's analysis of computer climate models shows as the beginning of a long dry period.

Works set in the American West and Midwest won major prizes at the 2006 National Book Awards on Wednesday, in a year when the fiction and nonfiction categories included two nominees inspired by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 or their aftermath. The nonfiction prize went to Timothy Egan for his look back at an earlier American crisis, "The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl," published by Houghton Mifflin. "We are a storytelling nation ...

According to legend, the 16th-Century Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado stood on a grassy butte 10 miles south of here and scanned the horizon in disappointment. The rumored city of gold that he was seeking was nowhere in sight, just mile after grassy mile of prairie. Wes Jackson, an explorer of another kind, also scans the horizon here with a hard heart.

Their fathers and grandfathers were homesteaders on the treeless grasslands of the northern prairies, where life has never been easy. But old-timers on the farms and ranches of western Canada's grain belt say the current drought affecting 45 million acres of southern Saskatchewan and Alberta is the worst since the dust bowl of the 1930s.

The continental U.S. endured the hottest summer this year since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and the second-warmest since recordkeeping began more than a century ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. A July heat wave that set more than 2,300 daily records across the nation and 50 all-time records contributed to an average temperature between June and August of 74.5 degrees Fahrenheit. That's just shy of the 1936 record of 74.