A towering dust cloud caused havoc in Arizona on Monday, grounding flights and leaving thousands without power.
The slow-moving cloud — known as a haboob — hit parts of Phoenix and Arizona City, 60 miles to the southeast, late Monday afternoon, at one point leaving 15,000 energy customers in the dark. The number still without power Tuesday morning was more than 5,000 according to Poweroutage.us, mostly in Maricopa County.
Videos posted to social media showed entire neighborhoods engulfed in darkness as the dust storm rolled through. One video shot from a passing plane showed the sheer extend of the cloud, stretching for miles into the distance.
A haboob is kicked up by the winds of a storm and typically affects arid, wide open spaces.
Heavy winds and rain followed the dust storm, causing delays at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, the country’s 11th busiest airport, which suffered some damage to a terminal roof.
Heather Shelbrack, the airport’s deputy aviation director for public relations, told the Associated Press news agency that staff were “identifying leaks and attempting to clean up water where it has collected in passenger areas.”Flash flood warnings were in place in some parts of Arizona and eastern California Monday night. Police in Gilbert, southeast of Phoenix, said heavy rain brought down trees and caused traffic light outages.
The Arizona Department of Transport earlier this summer advised motorists to never drive into a dust storm and to pull over where safe to do so in the event of getting stuck inside one.
Dust storms and 50 mph winds caused problems for campers at the Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert over the weekend.
