PALL OF DUST

Taranaki Daily News, 23 March 1935, Page 7

PALL OF DUST

UNITED STATES STORM MIDDLE WEST COVERED DAY TURNED INTO NIGHT MUD-SHROUDED MUMMIES ALL TRANSPORT HELD UP By Telegraph—Press Assn. —Copyright. Rec. 7. p.m. Kansas City, March 21. The middle west has been in the grip of continuous dust storms since the beginning of the week. To-day finds the situation exceptionally serious as a repetition of last year’s drought threatened. The dust storm area to-day extended from Texas to Dakota and from Oklahoma to Illinois, hundreds of thousands of acres of fine wheat lands being all but denuded and other areas covered with a plant-stifling layer of dust. Missouri housewives and municipalities could only await the settling of the dust before starting the seemingly hopeless task of cleaning homes and streets, none of which escaped the dust, as fluid as the air which bore it. It penetrated everywhere, coated furniture, and made breathing difficult. In western Kansas persons became lost in a continuous night. Schools were closed and highways were blocked by the Kansas highway patrol in order to avoid accidents. Train schedules were interrupted and aeroplanes were kept on the ground. To-day the sun shone palely. Automobile headlights gleamed a weird bluegreen, for all colours were intensified or distorted. Hundreds of hospital patients gulped air through wet cloths, and postmen went their rounds with masks over their faces. Merchants stripped their display windows, shut their doors and swathed their counters with protective sheets, and housewives packed pictures, linens and household furnishings away. A farmer wandered in circles and became lost in his ten-acre field until he fell exhausted and neighbours found him. The dust brought a dull headache to many, and sleeping was difficult. Hundreds wrapped in wet sheets arose to find themselves like mummies in shrouds of mud.

So dense was the dust pall at Chicago to-day that two aeroplanes hovered over the municipal airport for over an hour before ihe pilots, found a rift through which to land.