A man-made disaster on epic scale

During the decade-long drought that turned the southern Plains into the Dust Bowl, the hardest-hit area was centered on Boise City, Okla., in a part of the Panhandle formerly known as No Man’s Land. Here the storm sweeps over a farmstead on its way toward Boise City. (the Associated Press File Photo)

In 1930, with the Great Depression under way, wheat prices collapsed and desperate farmers harvested even more wheat in an effort to make up for their losses. Fields were left exposed and vulnerable to the drought that began in 1932.

Once the winds began picking up dust from the open fields, they grew into dust storms of biblical proportions. Each year, the storms grew more ferocious and more frequent, sweeping up millions of tons of earth, covering farms and homes across the plains with sand and spreading the dust across the country.

Children developed fatal “dust pneumonia,” business owners unable to cope with the financial ruin committed suicide, and thousands of desperate Americans were torn from their homes.

	If you go WHAT: “The Dust Bowl” preview WHEN: 7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 2 WHERE: African American Performing Arts Center, 301 San Pedro NE HOW MUCH: Free

It’s the largest man-made ecological disaster in history – and Ken Burns is now telling the story.

PBS and Burns have teamed up for “The Dust Bowl,” a two-part, four-hour documentary that chronicles the environmental catastrophe that, throughout the 1930s, destroyed the farmlands of the Great Plains.

While the disaster affected the Great Plains area, it was also felt in the Land of Enchantment.

And the documentary brought a small crew to New Mexico last winter to film.

“We had a multifaceted approach to the film,” says Julie Dunfey, a producer. “We had crews in Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma. We had teams all over the country looking for people who lived and were affected by this event.”

The documentary will air at 7 p.m. Nov. 18 and 19 on New Mexico PBS, and Dunfey will appear at 7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 2, at the African American Performing Arts Center at Expo New Mexico, 310 San Pedro NE.

Director Burns says the Dust Bowl was a heartbreaking tragedy in the enormous scale of human suffering it caused. But he said perhaps the biggest tragedy is that it was preventable.

“This was an ecosystem – a grassland – that had evolved over millions of years to adjust to the droughts, high winds and violent weather extremes so common to that part of the country,” he explains. “In the space of a few decades at the start of the 20th century, that grassland was uprooted in the middle of a frenzied wheat boom.

Photographer Arthur Rothstein captured this iconic Dust Bowl photograph of Art Coble and his sons, south of Boise City, Okla., in April 1936. (Courtesy of Library of Congress )

“When a drought returned, all that exposed soil took to the skies, and people worried that the breadbasket of the nation would become the next Sahara Desert. If we show the same neglect to the limits of nature now as we did then, it is entirely possible that this could happen again.”

Dunfey and her New Mexico crew were based out of Clayton, and they filmed at three abandoned homesteads north of the town.

They also filmed the landscapes in the Kiowa and Rita Blanca National Grassland, accompanied by Angela Safranek, who is a Range Specialist based in Clayton, and Stacy Galassini, the district archaeologist.

Dunfey says there were several interviews that took place at the Eklund Hotel in Clayton.

“The hotel had just closed due to financial woes,” she explains. “We were looking for a place to conduct the interviews and Craig Reeves of First National Bank of New Mexico stepped in and helped. The bank allowed us in and chaperoned us while we were there. It was a beautiful venue to do all of these interviews in.”

With the home base situated, Dunfey and crew also got help from Victoria Baker and the Herzstein Memorial Museum, which provided photo stills and content.

“We found some never-before-seen archival footage of a dust storm at the Center for Southwest Research and the Herzstein Latin American Reading Room at the University of New Mexico,” she explains. “The footage came from Herzstein family home movies and was tracked down by a descendant, Jessica Herzstein, who lives in (Washington,) D.C.”

Dunfey says she wanted to work on the project because it’s an event in American history that is often overlooked.

“It’s about human nature coming up against Mother Nature,” she says. “It’s the classic American tale of boom and bust. It’s something that keeps happening.”

FSA photographer Dorothea Lange came across Florence Thompson and her children in a pea pickers’ camp in Nipomo, Calif., in March 1936. During the decade of the Great Depression, California’s population grew by more than 20 percent, an increase of 1.3 million people. More than half of the newcomers came from cities, not farms. (Courtesy of Library of Congress)

Dunfey says crews spoke with 26 survivors while filming over the course of nine months. There were 6,628 photographs that were examined, and 658 of them were used.

“I tracked down 17 hours of historical newsreels and films, and only 44 minutes of that are in the film,” she says. “There are 33 rolls of live cinema, and 130 people over the age of 82 were interviewed. This will probably be their last recorded account because they are elderly. It was a race against time to make sure we spoke to these survivors.”

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