High Winds, Blinding Wall of Dust Blast Texas City

By Enjoli Francis
Oct 18, 2011 2:00pm
High Winds, Blinding Wall of Dust Blast Texas City
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ap lubbock texas nt 111018 wblog High Winds, Blinding Wall of Dust Blast Texas City

With winds gusting at 70 m.p.h., a massive dust storm enveloped Lubbock, Texas, in minutes Monday evening.

Usually called a “haboob,” the storm tore across Southwest Texas around 5:30 p.m. and formed an 8,000-foot-high mountain of dust. Visibility was near zero.

“My wife and I have lived in Lubbock for 49 years and in West Texas for 52 years, and I have never seen a dust storm like this,” City Councilman Paul Beane told The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal on Monday. “I have seen pictures from the Dust Bowl Days in the 1930s, but I never thought I would see anything like this.”

“[It was] a red dark sky and just a dust just coming our way,” one man said. “I actually ducked like it wasn’t going to take me away.”

At Chaparral Airport, planes were knocked over as if they were toys.

“All of a sudden it got pitch black and the teachers kept reminding us not to look back because it’s just wind but it was pitch black outside,” one student CBS News affiliate KLBK-13. ”We couldn’t see anything.”

Trees collapsed on homes and even tractor-trailers were no match for the column of sand. The damage is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.