TWO people were killed in storms that raged across the Midwest on Thursday after a terrifying video showed a wall of dust engulfing an entire town.
Hurricane-like winds, reaching up to 105mph, have torn across multiple states, with deaths reported in South Dakota and Minnesota
Straight-line winds have raised havoc from Kansas to Wisconsin, interfering with farmland topsoil and plunging communities into darkness as the dust was blown into the air.
One person was killed by a fallen tree in Sioux Falls, South Dakota as reported by the National Weather Service.
Another person was killed by a grain bin that fell onto a car, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.
The dust walls have been compared to images of the 1930s Dustbowl.
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“The damage is extensive, but it could have been a lot worse,” said Todd Heitkamp, meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service in South Dakota.
The most severe damage hit parts of Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, and Minnesota, Heitkamp said.
Dry conditions across the Midwest and Great Plains combined with traditional farming practices, like soil tillage, contributed to the dust storm according to Joanna Pope, Nebraska state public affairs officer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.
“The best defense to this type of stuff is installing cover crops and soil-saving practices like no-till,” Pope said.
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The storm has caused struggles for farmers who are under pressure to produce more food as people face record-high food prices and worries about possible shortages, Reuters reported.
In Nebraska, the winds have damaged irrigation systems that are used to offset dry conditions for recently planted crops.
Farmer Kevin Fulton shared that it could take weeks for the systems to be repaired.
Another farmer, Randy Loomis, was planting corn in Iowa when the storm passed through.
His neighbor’s grain bin was tossed into his yard due to the winds.
His wife and daughter abandoned their car and hid out in a ditch as the storm passed.
“That big dust cloud was three football fields wide,” said the 62-year-old. “It was just black. … it had sucked up all that black dirt.”