Oklahoma drought kindles spectre of 1930s 'Dust Bowl'
In the Oklahoma Panhandle, the most remote area of the state, recent rainfall has been so meagre that fears have been kindled of a return to the apocalyptic "Dust Bowl" scenes of the 1930s.
Gary McManus, the Oklahoma State Climatologist, told the BBC: "The drought right now is the worst in decades especially in western Oklahoma.
He highlights rainfall statistics for the weather station in Boise City in the midst of one of the hardest-hit areas, Cimarron County, where the total from October 1 2010 to June 12 2014 was just 43 inches.
By comparison, over the same period in the 1930s, a time of extraordinary hardship, Boise City received only 41.62 inches of rain.
Back then, massive dust storms destroyed such vast areas of farmland that a journalist, reporting on what became an environmental and human catastrophe, coined the term "Dust Bowl".
Years of drought, exacerbated by poor farming practices, left the fields without vegetation or any form of protection, so the soils were vulnerable to the winds.
In one notorious storm in April 1935, dust was swept all the way to Washington DC, where it alerted the federal authorities to the unfolding nightmare.
The wrecking of harvests and the crushing of livelihoods were then seared into the national memory in literature such as John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, with its account of the plight of the Joad family.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27986425
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