SMOTHERED IN DUST

Northern Advocate, 23 March 1935, Page 9

SMOTHERED IN DUST

SEVEEAL STATES MIDDLE-WEST AMERICA LIKE CONTINUOUS NIGHT. DROUGHT ACCOMPANIMENT. I [United Press Association —By Electric Telegraph.—Copyright.) KANSAS CITY, March 21. The Middle-Western States of America, which have • been in the grip of continuous dust storms since the beginning of the week, today faced an exceptionally serious situation, as a repetition of last year’s drought is threatened. The dust storm area today extended from Texas to North and South Dakota, and from Oklahoma to Illinois. Hundreds of thousands of acres of wheat lands have been all but denuded of their crops,- and other areas are covered with a plant-stifling layer of dust.

In Kansas and Missouri, housewives and municipalities could only await the settling, of the dust before starting the seemingly endless task of cleaning homes and streets. None escaped. The dust was as fluid as the air Which bore it, and it penetrated everywhere, coated furniture and made breathing difficult.

In Western Kansas people became lost in a continuous night. Schools were closed and the highways were blocked lay the Kansas Highway Patrol in order to avoid accidents.

Train schedules were ' interrupted and aeroplanes stayed on the ground. Today the sun - shone palely, whilemotor car headlights gleamed weirdly in blue "and green. All colours were intensified or distorted.

Hundreds of hospital patients gulped air through wet cloths. Postmen went on their routes with masks over their faces.

Merchants stripped their windows, shut: their doors, and swathed their counters with protective sheets. Housewives packed pictures, linens and "household furnishings away. A farmer wandered in circles, lost in his 10-acre field, until he fell exhausted. Neighbours finally found him. The dust caused dull headaches, and to many people sleep was difficult. Hundreds of people wrapped in wet sheets arose to find themselves like dummies in shrouds of mud. So dense was the dust fall in Chicago today that two aeroplanes hovered over the municipal air port for. more than an hour before the pilots found a rift through which to land.