Dust Storm of the Decade

City of Phoenix on July 5th, 2011 before it is engulfed by a wall of dust

     This is more for my friends and family who either do not live in Arizona or were not in Phoenix when this happened.
    
    For those of you who don't know, this wall of dust, also known as a "Haboob" (I know, weird name) is very common in the Middle East but also in Arizona as well.  During out Monsoon Season, which can range anywhere from June to September, we can get heavy thunderstorms with very powerful lightening, rain, wind and of course, alot of dirt.  I believe the weather man said that the monsoon season offically started on July 3rd this year (when the humidity is above 55% for 3 days or longer) and it certainly start started off with a bang.  On the evening of July 3rd we had a great thunderstorm, lots of lightening and rain, but not too much damage.  Of course we had another storm on July 4th and if you didn't know what happened there please see previous blogs.  This wall-o-dust hit on the evening of July 5th, right after we had cleaned up that mess in our front yard from the tree that fell the night before.   Here is video that was taken of this storm rolling in. You will see Sky Harbor International Airport and of course Chase Field.  Alot of people were nervous about this wall of dust since the All Star Game was this week (July 12th) but we had no issues with weather and in fact it was only 103F (40C) out.  Ha ha, only. I did not film this video, this is courtsey of YouTube from RussiaToday. And no, it was not a DoomsDay as everyone was calling it, it was just a very nasty wall of dust that stayed around for almost 24 hours.  Only bad thing about these types of storms is of course the layer of dust it left behind and people and animals tend to get sick with Valley Fever because of everything that gets stirred up. Swimming pools were filled with dirt and the valley just looked nasty. Rumor has it this wall of dust was 100 miles wide (161 km)  and about 1 mile high (1.6 km)

Now that you saw the profession video of this storm, you can see what it looked like at my house.  Yes it was light out and then it became black as night when it rolled in. I knew it was coming but didn't think anything of it because we get these every year but when I came outside after it hit, I was suprised at how dark and erie it was, when the sun wasn't all the way down yet.

This is my parking garage at work. Covered by the way and the wall o dust swept thru the entire thing. These are tire tracks from people driving in the next day. My work is about 45 minutes from where I live and was hit before it reached my home.

See the layer of dust in the air? Covers the mountain tops, almost like fog but its dirt in the air. This was 8-10 hours after the Wall-O-Dust hit.