Infamous dust storm fell over parts of New Mexico 90 years ago; could history repeat itself?

CLAYTON — On April 14, 1935, a wall of dust, hundreds of feet high, descended on farms and homes in the Great Plains. People drove as fast as they could to get away from the black clouds or covered their faces, windows and doors as quickly as possible.

Within minutes, fields were blown bare, pastures were covered in dust and towering dunes pressed against buildings and covered automobiles.

A lot has changed since “Black Sunday” and the Dust Bowl, including improvements to soil conservation techniques, and the creation of national grasslands, to prevent another Black Blizzard.

Despite this, New Mexico is in a statewide drought and continues to experience intense wind and dust. As of April 1, the National Weather Service in Albuquerque had issued more dust storm warnings in 2025, 40, than in the last 10 years combined, 37, NWS senior service hydrologist Andrew Mangham said.

And now, there could be fewer people to warn the public about dust storms or help farmers and ranchers implement conservation practices that stabilize soil and reduce erosion after the Trump administration cut hundreds of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration jobs and plans to terminate Natural Resources Conservation Services office and building leases, according to The Associated Press.

Could the drought, proliferation of dust storms and uncertainty in Washington, D.C., lead to the Land of Enchantment experiencing another Dust Bowl?

“I never say never,” said Thomas Gill, a University of Texas at El Paso professor of environmental science and engineering.

‘Things kept getting worse’

The Great Plains became home to thousands of people after Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862. Most of the settlers farmed their land or grazed cattle. The farmers plowed the prairie grasses and planted dryland wheat. As the demand for wheat products grew, cattle grazing was reduced, and millions of acres were plowed and planted.

Dryland farming led to the destruction of the prairie grasses. In the ranching regions, overgrazing destroyed large areas of grassland. Gradually, the land was laid bare, and significant environmental damage began to occur, according to records from the Library of Congress.

With the onset of drought in the early 1930s, the over-farmed and overgrazed land started blowing away. Winds blew across the plains, raising clouds of dust.

“We didn’t think much of the windstorms because they were so common,” said Dust Bowl survivor Fred W. Kear, who lived in Pennington in Union County. “(But) ... things kept getting worse.”

There were many dust storms during the decade, but the black tsunami that roamed across the Great Plains on “Black Sunday” has become synonymous with the Dust Bowl, also known as the “Dirty Thirties.”

Clayton resident Winfield Scott told the Journal he remembered as a 10-year-old the thick black and red dirt blowing across his family’s farm and into their small adobe house, 20 miles northwest of Texhoma, Oklahoma. His mother tried everything to keep the dust out, including wet towels to seal any openings, but she was unsuccessful. Scott said he didn’t know why his parents stayed.

“It was real scary,” he said as tears flowed down his cheeks.

Scott died on March 25 at the age of 100, almost three weeks before the 90th anniversary of “Black Sunday.”

In an article published in the April 15, 1935, edition of the Albuquerque Tribune, a United Press reporter said dust near Clayton that Sunday was “inescapable.”

“It sifted through the double walls of the barns and made the air almost unbreathable,” he said. “It was like emery dust. My lungs still ache.”

In Clayton, people tied ropes to their homes and neighbors’ houses so they could walk down the street because the dust was “too thick to see,” Clayton resident Charles Jordan said.

“We thought it was our judgment, we thought it was our doom,” songwriter Woody Guthrie wrote in “The Great Dust Storm.”

Responding to the ‘menace’

Efforts to address soil erosion had been ongoing since the 1920s. But the dust storms of 1934-35 — including those in March 1935 that blew into Washington, D.C., as hearings for the Soil Conservation Act were being held — moved Congress to act, according to the FDR Presidential Library.

On April 27, 1935, 13 days after “Black Sunday,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the act into law. It declared soil erosion a “national menace” and directed the secretary of Agriculture to create the Soil Conservation Service, now the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The SCS developed programs to retain topsoil and prevent irreparable damage to the land. Farming techniques such as strip cropping, terracing, crop rotation and cover crops were promoted.

The federal government also purchased millions of acres of land affected by the Dust Bowl. Some of the land was later transferred to the U.S. Forest Service and designated as national grasslands.

The grasslands improved soil stability and vegetative recovery and “demonstrate(d) successful ecosystem restoration of lands that were degraded during the Dust Bowl era,” Patricia Johnson, spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service — Cibola National Forest & National Grasslands — said in an email.

Despite federal efforts, dust storms persisted over the years, especially during the 1950s, that some say were as intense as those during the Dust Bowl, said Britney Swart, director of the Herzstein Memorial Museum in Clayton.

Barbara Copeland was living on a ranch near Amistad during the ’50s when a severe dust storm came through. Like people in the “Dirty Thirties,” her family put up damp towels and clothes all over the house, but to no avail. The bathtub “almost filled up” with dirt, sand and topsoil, she said.

“It was just a struggle, but we persevered,” she said.

A few miles northwest of Copeland is the Hauser Ranch, which experienced dust storms from the 1930s and ’50s.

To prevent future dust deadly storms, the Hausers had terracing done on their property. Terracing is a soil conservation practice applied to prevent rainfall runoff on sloping land from accumulating and causing serious erosion, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Terracing holds the water “so it doesn’t dry up,” Kodie Hauser said, but that is when they receive precipitation, which has been rare lately.

“There used to be more grass, but we just haven’t gotten the rain,” she said. If these conditions continue, Hauser said, it “might cause us to go back to those days.”

‘Could get Dust Bowl-like again’

Northeast New Mexico is not the only part of the state dealing with a lack of precipitation.

“All but a tiny sliver of New Mexico is in (a) drought,” especially southern New Mexico where places are in severe to exceptional drought, and “that’s long-term drought,” Gill said.

The state has been experiencing drought conditions for 20 years, Mangham said.

“As long as we continue to have extensive and severe droughts, with windstorms, dust storms will happen in some areas such as El Paso and Las Cruces,” Gill said.

The National Weather Service El Paso office issued 44 dust storm warnings so far this year, which is more than double from all of 2023, 21, senior forecaster Bladen Breitreiter said.

“We have seen a massive uptick in dust storms,” Mangham said. “Whether that means we’ll see a Dust Bowl comparable to 1935, I can’t really say.”

The intensity of the dust storms appears to be mostly driven by the intensity of windstorms, like the cyclone that brought strong winds, thick blowing dust and severe thunderstorms to parts of New Mexico and Texas on March 14, Gill said.

“I don’t know what the forecast is for the prospect of continuing windstorms across our region, but I expect they aren’t going to suddenly shut down any time soon,” he said.

The amount of dust storm warnings issued could be affected by cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA is responsible for forecasting weather, tracking climate trends and overseeing the National Weather Service.

NOAA spokesperson Marissa Anderson told the Journal it doesn’t comment on “internal personnel and management matters,” but added that “NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience.”

That resiliency could be tested.

Despite a lot being learned about proper land management techniques that have helped farmers and ranchers , the ongoing drought, frequent dust storms and federal layoffs and cuts could create conditions ripe for another Black Blizzard.

If a “’megadrought’ that lasted for multiple decades hit — we know from tree rings that these have hit the Southwest in the past — and if there was an extreme economic crash at the same time,” Gill said, “conditions could get Dust Bowl-like again.”