Incredible dust storm whipped through here last night. If it were sand and not fine, sifting dust, hot and not cool, I’d say it was just like the shamals we used to get in the Saudi Arabian desert. The heat dropped a good 20 degrees as the dust moved through. It’s down to 80 right now.
Turn off your sound before clicking on the video above; the TV station inflicts a particularly annoying, noisy ad on viewers before letting you get at the images. Here’s a more polite video by an amateur photographer, but shorter and without the awesome sky photos.
The storm hit the suburbs to the south of us around 7:00 p.m., while it was still light out. An hour or so later, M’hijito remarked, over the phone, that a gigantic wall of something was bearing down on us; by then it wasn’t obvious by looking at the storm front that it was dust. A few minutes later, though, it sure was! When I peeked out the front door, I literally could not see the houses across the street!
Here it is again moving through one of those ghettos for families with kids in the East Valley:
Ugh. So much for having spent six and a half hours cleaning house the day before yesterday. Everything—every piece of furniture, every square inch of flooring, every windowsill, every baseboard, every piece of decorative trim on the woodwork—is coated with dust. This morning both classes are unloading a ton of work on me, so there’ll be no time to clean house. About the best I’ll be able to manage will be to pull Harvey out of the pool and dump in some extra chlorine. And backwash. Again.
Doesn’t look like much debris fell in the drink, though. It’s just cloudy with dust. At this hour—3:45 in the morning—I can’t see much out there. Will have to wait until 5, I guess, to get to work on that project.
Whee. Why do I live in this place, again?
LOL – reminds me of July 1975 in West Texas. My first weekend visit with my future (now ex-) in-laws. We had gone to a July 4th outdoor concert/fireworks & had just settled into our seats when the in-laws & the future hubby jumped up, grabbed me, & hauled it to the car. (No one else was going anywhere at that point.) But by the time we reached the car, that was the same view we had – only it was a wall of red dust, really eerie in the setting sun. I remember repeated major dust storms out there through the early 1980’s. My former grandfather-in-law said it was God’s way of keeping the riffraff & sissies from moving there.
And you’re not kidding about the dust everywhere in the house, no matter how well-sealed your doors & windows are. My (still current) brother in law thought we were making up the dust storm stories until he was in town when one blew through.
We had a dry hurricane here about 10 years ago with 100 mph winds but this windstorm was bigger and badder than anything I have seen here.
You’re right, that is some freaky video. Brings back memories of living in the Middle East. Back in the day, weatherstripping was nonexistent, with the same results with a dust-coated house as you went through.
@ 101 Centavos: Ah, the good ole days! Did you have those loosely woven straw rugs on the floors? The idea was that the sand would sift through to the concrete floor beneath, so when you walked barefooted around the house you wouldn’t be scrabbling through grainy sand, which was constantly sifting in through the cracks around the windows and doors or being tracked in on shoes and sandals.
Eventually my mother talked my father into ordering some wall-to-wall carpeting from Sears (the height of fashion!!). He and a couple of his friends installed it. She was so thrilled!
After some time, as one would expect, it got all sandy and dirty. One day he decided he would pull it up, throw it over the clotheslines, and WASH IT IN THE HOSE. If you can imagine… Well. Yes. It shriveled up and shrank. I think she would’ve killed him if she hadn’t figured he’d get her first. 😀 Good thing they’d brewed up plenty of hootch on the still in the kitchen.
Yep, straw mats and lots of bedouin rugs. Every once in a while, they’d get turned over, and the foot traffic would shake the dust and dirt loose on the tile floors.