Minggu, 31 Agustus 2014

Swirls of Dust and Drama, Punctuating Life in the Southwest - New York Times

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U.S. |Swirls of Dust and Drama, Punctuating Life in the Southwest



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An evening dust storm rolled through Papago Park in Phoenix on July 3. Such a storm, frequent in the Southwest’s driest parts, is sometimes called a haboob, Arabic for “blowing.” Dave Seibert/The Arizona Republic




PHOENIX — The best way to explain a haboob is to say it is a tsunami of sand, in the sense that there is no stopping it or outrunning it. It is a supreme spectacle. The fierce winds that precede it make the leaves on palm trees stand as if they are hands waving an effusive goodbye, the sky darkens and the world takes the color of caramel as the dust swallows everything in its path.


Last week, a dense dust storm turned daytime into night in Palm Springs, Calif., “blowing so bad that I could not even see 20 feet in front of my Jeep,” Scott Pam, a local photographer, wrote on his Facebook page. The last haboob struck Phoenix in late July; streetlights came on as it rolled over the city’s center, even though it was still afternoon.


Coping with a haboob becomes a way of life in the Southwest, so frequent are dust storms in the region’s driest parts. But it takes time for newcomers to learn to pull to the side of the road and turn off the headlights at the first sign of such a storm.


On the road, visibility goes from normal to zero in seconds, and it is hard to prepare because the dust storms often strike with little warning. Children are taught what to do as early as preschool; a firefighter might visit a classroom to deliver the message “When there’s a dust storm, stop and stay in the car.”


The Arizona Department of Transportation has run its “Pull Aside, Stay Alive” campaign for three years, though for the first time this year, it is going to stretch its public service announcements through the fall, as some of the deadliest dust storms of recent years have struck well past the end of summer.


“In simple terms,” said Ken Waters, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Phoenix, dust storms happen “because you have a very strong wind moving out from a thunderstorm and a lot of dust lying around.”


The largest one on record here happened on July 5, 2011, rising 5,000 to 8,000 feet and stretching about 50 miles, from Goodyear, Ariz., to the west, to Apache Junction, Ariz., to the east. A moist coat of dust on counters and floors is inevitable after a storm, big or small. And, no, it does not matter if windows and doors are tightly shut.


Driving Into AZ Haboob Dust Storm HD Video by maholler2010

Summers in the Southwest are always punctuated by extremes: extreme heat, extreme dust and extreme rain. Last week, 4.6 inches of rain fell just outside of Phoenix, or almost three times as much rain as the metropolitan Phoenix region got all of last summer. In minutes, dried paths turned into gushing rivers, which flooded, dragged or damaged freeways, cars and homes. In other parts of the area, it only drizzled.


But it is the monster waves of dust that seem to generate the most drama — traveling hundreds of miles and rising thousands of feet into the sky, turning daytime into night. The blaring beeps of cellphone weather alerts might well be the soundtrack of the season, when dust coats and monsoons drench selectively.


Some dust storms are so huge that meteorologists had to reach into the driest corners of Iraq and Sudan to find an equivalent — and, in turn, to find a name that suits them: haboob. It is Arabic for “blowing,” which sort of describes what it feels like when those storms roll along.


Mr. Waters, the meteorologist, compared the experience of driving through one of them to that of “a pilot who is not trained on instruments and has to land the plane under heavy fog.” (He avoided using the word “haboob” to describe those vast dust storms, and the term has met some resistance in Arizona because of its Middle Eastern origin.)


Last October, three people lost their lives and 12 were hospitalized in multiple crashes involving 19 vehicles caught in a dust storm on Interstate 10 about 75 miles east of Phoenix. Almost at the same spot, in October 2011, one man died and 23 were injured in pileups also set off by a dust storm.


“What motorists sometimes fail to understand is that if they’re driving, they’ve got to slow down, get completely off the roadway, as far as they can go off the roadway, stop, take their foot off the brake, and turn off their hazard lights and any other lights in their car,” said Timothy Tait, a spokesman for the Transportation Department. Because the last thing they would want, he said, “is for other drivers to follow your lead, thinking you’re driving along when you have already stopped.”


So the department has tried to spread safety tips in creative ways and through nontraditional channels, hoping that somehow the message will stick. Its #haboobhaiku contest is billed as “the one and only contest to mix an ancient form of poetry with dust storm safety,” and has drawn thousands of entries. (One recent submission reads, “You’re not a Jedi/This is not Tatooine, Luke/Pull over now, man.”)


“We wanted people to really focus on driving behavior and tips,” Mr. Tait said. “And it seems like it’s easier to make those things stick if people are having fun.”



A version of this article appears in print on August 30, 2014, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Swirls of Dust and Drama, Punctuating Life in the Southwest.




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