Don Churchbaugh still remembers the eerie feeling he got one afternoon nearly 70 years ago standing in a field watching mysterious black clouds roll toward him from the west.

“It wasn’t a thunderstorm,” Churchbaugh, 84, recalled during an interview last week at his farm in southwestern Douglas County. “We didn’t know what it was.”

The clouds were formed by tons of dust, carried into the sky by high winds passing over parched fields in western Kansas and dumped on unsuspecting farms and towns hundreds of miles to the east.

Churchbaugh thinks it was late March in 1934 when he experienced a dust storm for the first time. Only a teenager at the time and living on the same farm where he lives today, Churchbaugh considers the 1930s Dust Bowl days the most difficult of his life.

Not only did the dust make it difficult to farm, ponds and a well on the Churchbaugh farm dried up for lack of rain.

Then there was the grasshopper invasion.

“They were everywhere,” Churchbaugh said. “You couldn’t grow anything.”

Churchbaugh admitted being uneasy about the current Kansas drought. Two of the past three summers have been hot and dry, he said — just like some of the Dust Bowl years he remembers.

Cyclical drought

“I hope I never have to go through anything like that again,” Churchbaugh said.

The year 2002 was, indeed, a dry year in the Lawrence area, weather records show. A total 26.11 inches of precipitation fell, at least seven inches less than normal. That included 15.5 inches of snow and 24.56 inches of rain.

Don Churchbaugh, 84, kneels in a field on a farm south of Lawrence, where he was born, raised and now lives. Churchbaugh remembers the days of the Dust Bowl and has seen similarities in the dry weather of 2002.

And the two driest months of the year came in November and December. Less than half an inch of moisture fell in November — just 0.21 inches — and only 0.07 inches fell in December.

That doesn’t mean it’s time to push the panic button, said Matt Makens, 6News meteorologist.

“The drought cycle we are in now seems to occur about once every 25 years,” he said.

For example, in 1966 the precipitation total was 24.63 inches. In December 1966 the total was 0.78 inches. The next year moisture was abundant, with more than 51 inches of precipitation.

One dry year followed by three, four or five wet years is a cycle that appears repeatedly in Lawrence weather history dating to 1939. The city’s official weather records are logged at Lawrence Municipal Airport.

The year 2002 also was hot, but it usually is hot in Kansas, weather forecasters say. The hottest month of last year was July, which had an average high temperature of 93 degrees, and the hottest day measured 103 degrees.

The coldest month was January, with an average high of 46 degrees and an average low of 22 degrees.

Another Dust Bowl?

Don Churchbaugh weathered dust storms during the Great Depression.

At the end of January and beginning of February the area was hit by a damaging ice storm. The storm toppled trees and limbs and knocked out electricity to thousands of homes. Many were without power for several days.

In 2002, the largest precipitation totals came in April (5.75 inches) and May (4.95 inches).

There is little to indicate a dust bowl might return to Kansas, Makens said. Though there are no adequate records for the 1930s Dust Bowl years in Lawrence, Makens said, such a weather event is generally the result of multiple dry years.

“Our drought hasn’t been that long,” Makens said. “If this continues another year or more, then it could be a problem.”

¢ Parched Prairie series by Bill Snead

Even if the area experienced a prolonged drought, Kansas has several reservoirs that could be tapped for irrigation purposes if necessary, Makens said. Those reservoirs, such as Clinton and Perry lakes, didn’t exist in the 1930s.

Ill-advised farming practices in the 1930s also led to the Dust Bowl, Makens said.

“Farmers today are a lot smarter than they were in the 1930s,” Makens said. “They are not going to do things that turn the soil to dust.”