The Winter Storm Atlas

On January 12, 1888, the weather in the west was mild, compared to previous weeks. Little did the people know that a massive cold front was in route and would be catastrophic to the people, their livestock, and the economy in the dekota and nebraska praries. The cold front would cause one of the worst blizzards for the region, killing close to 500 people. The factors that made the death toll so high involve the mild weather before the storm, the lack of technology for warning systems, and bad timing.

The setting takes place in a small town called “Starkfield”. Starkfield is a town that is just like its name, it is boring, barren, severe, and harsh. Starkfield is known for its many harsh winters that leave the inhabitants bitter and in harsh condition. Starkfield is a village that lays “under a sheet of snow perpetually renewed from the pale skies” (pg.10).By the time the snow is gone and things are well it snows again. Not only is the snow harsh but it acts as a barrier to many of the residents keeping

The novel Road to Winter (2016) by Mark Smith is set in the aftermath of a deadly virus that has wiped out most of the of the population in and around Angowrie, Australia. The text follows the adventures of Finn Morrison, a teenage boy who was left stranded after the death of his parents during the epidemic. When Finn encounters another survivor named Rose, his life becomes very chaotic and dangerous, Smith has successfully highlighted that when survival is threatened, it is not every man for himself. Finn and Rose, Ray and Finn and Ramage and his wilder gang are all excellent examples of groups when survival is threatened.

The dust bowl was a nitty gritty nightmare that lasted about a decade. It took place in the drought-stricken region of the United States, midst the Great Depression era. This period in time is generally considered as one of the hardest times in history. The dust bowl storms were often so atrocious that people referred to them as "Black Blizzards." Not only did the dust bowl make things tough for farmers, when the dust bowl swept up around 100 million acres of topsoil, but also for the rest of middle, United States.1

In some cases, school was cancelled because of these storms. In the same year, slightly after noon on January 21st, a dust storm was reported that rose up to 10,000 feet in the air with winds that blew 60 miles per hour. According to Duncan, the local weather bureau called it “awe-inspiring” and “most spectacular”. An Associated Press reporter gave the Dust Bowl its name the day after Black Sunday, which was the worst dust storm reported (Ganzel). These storms were so devastating that people had to cover their faces with wet rags in fear they would get dust pneumonia, a deadly condition where dirt would clog up the lungs (Klein). They were also fearful of being caught outside of their house in the middle of a dust storm, because the storms rolled with thousands upon thousands of fine particles of dirt that would completely block out the sun, and no light could penetrate the blanket of darkness (Ganzel). The residents of the Great Plains couldn’t even escape the dust inside their own homes. The dust would somehow percolate through the tiniest of cracks, crevices, or gaps in the walls, windowsills, and door frames (Duncan 51). These deadly storms were also capable of producing so much static electricity between the ground and the airborne dust that even a simple handshake could initiate a spark so powerful it would knock them to the ground (Klein). The entire region of the Plains was affected, and eventually the entire country (Ganzel).

In 1888 on a Thursday afternoon 235 people were killed by a blizzard on their way home from school. Taking place in the Northwest Plains region of the United States the blizzard came without a warning temperature went down 100 degrees in a 24 hour. On a Thursday afternoon, a day before the storm it was unusually warm from Montana east to the Dakotas and south to Texas. Then suddenly within a couple hours the Arctic air that came from Canada went South. In North Dakota temperatures went forty degrees below zero. High winds and heavy snow came with the storm which caused terrible conditions. In rural areas adults working on farms and children coming home from school were the ones who were mostly affected by the blizzard. A schoolteacher in Pawnee

“Black Blizzard.” These dust storms caused cattle to choke as they had nowhere to run and no

One has not experienced the life of living in dirt until he has been in the dust bowl. It was a decade-long dust storm that impacted hundreds of farmers and their farmlands. Hardship was among one of the influences of the storm, which affected both farm workers and city folks. The storm also brought the elements of destruction and darkness, which reigned chaos across the Plains. Together, these issues gave the storm its popular name, “black blizzard” (Documentary, 2014). Such a name was given due to the storm’s visibility as a large black cloud, which made it look evil and scary. Although the black blizzard is what some people call the dust storm, most will refer it as the dust bowl.

The drought killed the remaining plants and crops leaving nothing behind to anchor the dirt to the ground. As winds began to rise they ripped away the topsoil, exposed from bad farming practices, from the Earth; and by 1934 more than 35 million acres of farmland became sterile and useless and another 125 acres of topsoil were being rapidly drained. Large dust storms called “Black Blizzards” would originate in the Dust Bowl states and make its way to the East Coast as far as New York City, Washington D.C., and covered ships in the Atlantic Ocean with dust. Some were as large as 2 miles high traveling more than 2000 miles such as the one that occurred on May 11, 1934. The worst of the Black Blizzards came on April 14, 1935 with wind speeds up to 100 miles per hour carrying over 3 million tons of topsoil with it (Blakemore). The storm turned the skies black frightening people across the Midwest and East Coast. One observer said, it was like “the Red Sea closing in on the Israel children… it got so dark that you couldn’t see your hand before your face, you couldn’t see anybody in the room”. The stormed ended up destroying fields and causing car accidents and several people were left blind or with pneumonia.

In the decades leading up to the drought, the area received average to above average rainfall allowing the farmers to be successful at their jobs. They continued plowing up large amounts of grass to plant wheat and using other portions of the land for livestock grazing. Ranchers and farmers in these areas set the land for failure prior to occurrence of the drought. The Midwest had become transformed from a prairie grass land to a region that exposed the bare earth. The combination of very little rainfall, light soil and high winds created a high potential chance for extreme weather to occur. In this area, the soil lacked stronger root system of grass as an anchor as result, “black blizzards” occurred when the loose topsoil was picked up and swirled into dust

As with the huge snowstorm of December 1974 another even more powerful (in terms of intensity/extent) storm is of strong interest to all meteorologists who have studied winter storms in the Great Lakes. This storm is also of interest and remembrance to many longtime residents of the Great Lakes, the Upper Ohio Valley and Ontario, Canada who had to deal with winter's full fury late in January of 1978. In addition, the storm certainly casts many memories for those of us who were on duty and worked during the storm...while being in awe of the development and subsequent immense strength of this great monster. With the 30th anniversary of this Great Blizzard at hand, it is worth taking a step back in time to re-live this monumental example of nature's fury.

The predictions of forecast back around in that time, at times, could have been helpful, other times would not. Though the people had forecast predictions, they were often inaccurate. The forecasters, or indication officers, claimed that their predictions were accurate 83.7 percent of the time for the following day. The indication officers were not allowed to say certain things about the predicted forecast, which often affected the communities negatively not only for this certain occasion but for others, as well. For example, an officer could not even say the word tornado in any of their forecast predictions. The coastal cities of the nation thought that they were immune to the disaster of a hurricane, so forecasters would never mention a such a tragic storm in the predictions of the forecast. On top of the believed immunity and forbidden words to be mentioned in forecasts, the method of predictions was not at the best, either. Instead of relying on the physics of a storm and deeply studying it, indication officers turned more to geometry and cartography, the science of drawing maps, to predict where the storm will go. This did not leave the communities vulnerable for just this blizzard, but for pretty much every storm that swept across the nation, as

Many Dust Storms in the 1930s had Jurassic effects on the Farmers. Immediately they had to move and abandoned everything that they had known.This eventually affected them these were some of the reasons for The Great Depression. This made Farmers to adapt and, change their lifestyle in just a couple of minutes such as, losing farms, not being able to support their own family, owing bank money, and having to move to a different state. I had researched five different farmers from the 1930’s. They all had about the same story. LeRoy Hankel was a young farmer he said when he heard his first dust storm he had heard up to a 100 mile per hour winds. He was in the Great Depression time Stock Markets were dropping and this was not good. LeRoy said

As the Great Depression continued to tighten its grip on America, nature turned against many already suffering Americans. The Dusty Bowl, also know as the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damages the ecology and agricultural production of the United States and Canadian plains. Many farmers and ranchers were driven to the Great Plains by the American sense of expansion. The land they inhabited was used primarily for ranching till advances in agricultural mechanization and high grain prices caused by World War I, made agriculture more productive as ever; thus causing farmers to exploit the land in their attempt to make a large profit, setting up the region for an environmental catastrophe. As a result of over farming, a failure to implement dryland farming techniques-which would have prevented topsoil wind erosion-and a severe drought, 150,000 square miles of land in Kansas, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, faced havoc not previously seen in American history. The first “black blizzard” occurred in 1931, and they occurred till conservation efforts in the 1940s, but the damage had been done, reflected on the upturned land and record heat, as well as the unleashed swarm of locust and jackrabbits, causing terror in children and adults alike. Consequently, massive amounts of people migrated from the plains fleeing the storms, and those who stayed faced the harmful effects from the inhalation of dust particles.

The Dustbowl was a series of extreme and deadly dust storms in the nineteen thirties that caused severe droughts and destroyed farm land throughout the southwestern United States. The deadly dust storms took over seven thousand lives mainly due to dust pneumonia and other respiratory problems (“When Deadly Dirt Devastated the Southern Plains”). On April fourteenth, nineteen thirty five the worst dust storm in American history occurred. Commonly known as Black Sunday, the dust storm eradicated farms and caused thousands of people to migrate to San Joaquin Valley. Many people died that late afternoon, due to the dust filling their lungs. Not only had the Dustbowl taken thousands of lives it also cause economic damage. During that time America’s