November 22, 2019 ▸ Disaster, History

Episode 431: The Dust Bowl: Oklahoma’s Epic Fail

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On this episode of the world famous Sofa King Podcast, we look at one of the biggest natural disasters in American history—The Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl was a period of ten years where the perfect mixture of events combined to destroy all of agriculture in Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, and Kansas. It led to millions of people fleeing the area and dust storms that raged for days and killed countless people due to malnutrition and illness. One particular storm, called Black Sunday was so bad that it caused a storm that swept up a million tons of top soil from Oklahoma and dumped them as far away as Canada, Chicago, and New York! Even though the events of the Dust Bowl predate global warming by a century, it serves as a cautionary tale of how bad things can get with a quickness when weather and humans collide for mass stupidity.

So what caused the dust bowl? It was a mix of things, and of course if something is wrong US, the government was involved. In order to lure settlers out to more undesirable areas of the country, the US made offers of free land which expanded and ended up being as high as 640 free acres in some states. This lured people with no farming knowledge to head to the area and start a life working the earth. So, thousands of unskilled workers showed up and were suddenly given all the advances of the industrial age to help work the soil. This combined in the worst way to harm the topsoil after just a few years of bad crop decisions.

Now, the other part of the equation was that the area was known to have heavy rains for a decade and then light rains for a decade, but none of the farmers knew about the light rains. So, with soil that was overworked and in bad condition, the drought settled in, and once-fertile soil turned into nothing but sand and dust.

This spread through several states until every storm turned into a dust storm with a blacked sky and nothing to stop the ground from being pushed away Dozens of dust storms in just a few years made the area impossible to farm, and the dust itself caused health problems.

This was all during the Great Depression to make things even worse, so everyone was starving, couldn’t work their land, and had no other line of work to turn to. Hundreds of thousands of “Oakies” moved to California to find work, but there was very little to be found. The static electricity was so bad in the arid, dusty atmosphere that people would get knocked on their butts from the discharge of simply shaking hands. It was a time of rail riding hoboes, bad health, mass migration, and biblical omens like red skies, hidden suns, and plagues of rabbits and bugs. If you’re into history, or just even just hoboes, give this one a listen.

Visit our Sources

https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/dust-bowl-cause.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/depwwii/dustbowl/

https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/dust-bowl

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/dust-bowl-surviving-dust-bowl/

https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/water_02.html

https://www.thebalance.com/what-was-the-dust-bowl-causes-and-effects-3305689

https://drought.unl.edu/dustbowl/Home.aspx

http://www.softschools.com/facts/us_history/dust_bowl_facts/814/

https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-dust-bowl

https://www.phactual.com/17-interesting-facts-about-the-dust-bowl/