Today we actually had a thunderstorm. One lightening strike and one clap of thunder. That is exciting for San Diego County. I say that tongue in cheek. In some areas of the county today they had more than one lightening strike, our little Ashley had to work in North County today and told Kyle there was an actual honest to goodness thunderstorm and some areas even had hail over by the coast.
Jerry and I had to go to downtown San Diego today to pick up some papers for his business, while there we had the one lightening strike and about 30 seconds of rain. Boy, do I remember the thunderstorms in Iowa and these little "rainstorms" here do not compare in the least.
I am currently reading the book The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, and it is a very good read. It is about the dustbowl of the 30s, it is non-fiction. Sometimes I am having a hard time seperating the events in the book with California's reality right now. This state is in a severe drought and water rationing for San Diego County started on June 1st.
As I am reading the book I can almost taste the dust as it swirled and buried the High Plains of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska. There had been droughts before in this section of the United States as all areas go through a heavy rain to drought conditions cycle. In the 1910s through the 1920s, people came from all over the country, in fact the world, to get a piece of the territory in the High Plains as the land was plenty and cheap. But with all the farmers ripping out the natural plains grasslands, that grass that had protected the soil forever was removed and not replaced with the soil conservation techniques that are practiced today. Tons and tons of loose dirt and dust was left to blow from state to state when farms were lost due to the depression and no one was there to plant crops on the empty fields. The picture above is of a duststorm. Sometimes the sky would be so black it was like night during the day. People died due to "dust pnuemonia", so much dust in the air that it literally suffocated people and animals.
When I lived in Iowa, the first year we were there, one day it was particularly windy. I remember looking up in the sky and it was brown. I said to one of my elderly neighbors how I was surprised that Iowa would have smog, seeing as it is mostly flatland. (Back in the 1980s before I moved to Iowa, it was not uncommon for the sky to be brown with smog here in San Diego County because the mountains kept it from blowing out, thankfully, since moving back in 2000, I have not seen the smog anything like it was before I moved).
On that windy day in Iowa, my neighbor said to me "Ah, that isn't smog, that's just farmers exchanging property".
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