What was the worst environmental disaster in the United States?

Question: What was the worst environmental disaster in the United States?

Many accidents and events have done serious environmental damage in the United States, but have you ever wondered which was the worst?

Answer: If you guessed the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, the 2008 coalash spill in Tennessee or the Love Canal toxic dump disaster that came to light in the 1970s, you're decades too late in every case.

Scientists and historians generally agree that the Dust Bowl—created by the drought, erosion and dust storms, or "black blizzards," of the so-called Dirty Thirties—was the worst and most prolonged environmental disaster in American history.

The dust storms started at about the same time that the Great Depression really began to grip the country, and continued to sweep across the Southern Plains—western Kansas, eastern Colorado and New Mexico, and the panhandle regions of Texas and Oklahoma—until the late 1930s. In some areas, the storms didn't relent until 1940.


Decades later, the land is still not completely restored, once thriving farms are still abandoned, and new dangers are again putting the Great Plains environment in serious jeopardy.

Causes and Effects of the Dust Bowl
In the summer of 1931, the rain stopped coming and a drought that would last for most of the decade descended on the region. Crops withered and died. Farmers who had plowed under the native prairie grass that held the soil in place saw tons of topsoil, which had taken thousands of years to accumulate, rise into the air and blow away in minutes.

On the Southern Plains, the sky turned lethal. Livestock went blind and suffocated, their stomachs full of fine sand. Farmers, unable to see through the blowing sand, tied themselves to guide ropes to go from the house to the barn. Families wore respiratory masks handed out by Red Cross workers, cleaned their homes each morning with shovels as well as brooms, and draped wet sheets over doors and windows to help filter the dust. Still, children and adults inhaled sand, coughed up dirt, and died of a new epidemic called "dust pneumonia."

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