November 2012PDF 5.57 MB - South Plains Electric Cooperative

Texas USA
Rouge Awakening
on the High Plains H
Fast-moving front kicks up
roiling dust cloud—a haboob—
that overtakes October day
in Panhandle
BY SUZANNE HABERMAN
Insert B Texas Co-op Power SOUTH PLAINS EC November 2012
South Plains Electric Cooperative
Lineman Brent Adcock was on call, driving
his bucket truck on Interstate 27
north of Lubbock on October 17, 2011,
when he saw an airborne wall of redbrown
dirt in the distance moving down
the Southern Plains. Stretching far up in
the sky and forming a distinctive line at
the edge of a northerly cold front, this
intense dust storm, or haboob, was coming
at him—fast.
“At first, it looked brown, but then it
looked like red-colored sand. But it
almost looked like … I don’t know,”
Adcock paused. “It was just rolling. It
looked like a big cloud of dirt rolling
across the ground. Pretty intense.”
Adcock and the haboob sped toward
each other, and in about five minutes, the
wall of dirt he’d spotted 30 miles out was
all around him, and the sky went dark.
Streetlights came on as though it were
night, and sand pelted his truck. The dust
was so thick you could taste it.
Unable to see the hood of his truck,
Adcock slowed to a crawl for the next five
or six miles, trying to navigate through
the nearly blackout conditions. “Kind of
scary,” he said, admitting he would rather
drive through a blizzard.
The dust cleared in under an hour, but
Adcock worked all night in the aftermath
to help restore power, as straight-line
winds downed utility poles and trees and
propelled debris into electrical lines.
Before the haboob formed, the
autumn Monday had been unseasonably
warm, with temperatures ranging from
the 80s to 90s across the region. Skies
were partly cloudy, and light winds
danced over the Caprock.
“It was pretty that whole day,” said
Brady Askew, member services adviser
for Tahoka-based Lyntegar EC. Askew
was at his family’s cotton farm south of
Lubbock when the weather suddenly
changed. “It was windy all day,” he said,
“but nothing like it was when the haboob
came.”
By late afternoon, a fast-moving cold
front had swept over the Rockies, and sped
south into Texas at 50 mph, bringing temperatures
down about 20 degrees, according
to the National Weather Service.
Over the dry flatlands, winds gusted up
to 74 mph—as powerful as a Category 1
hurricane—lifting dirt into the air ahead
of the front. Forming about 80 miles
north of Lubbock, the thick wall of dust
grew up and up, and then quickly raked
over the city, where it struck Bradley
Allen, South Plains EC system support
specialist, as being stranger than science
fiction.
He, like most other Panhandle residents,
had experienced a “normal Lubbock
dust storm” that “comes in low and
gets out,” but was not prepared for a fullblown
haboob. “It was amazing when I
had to turn straight into the cloud. It was
daunting, too,” Allen said. “It reminded
me of going through the Stargate: You
don’t know what’s on the other side.”
But only more dust was on the other
side as the system continued to race
southward for about three hours, all the
way past Askew’s cotton fields, where the
winds pulled the white lint from bolls,
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