Quite a few grey nomads who have spent a lot of time travelling in the Outback have come across – or nearly come across – the giant dust storms that occasionally sweep through.
And the one that hit the remote Queensland town of Boulia on Sunday afternoon was an absolute humdinger.
Local resident Leaim Shaw said the storms are fairly common in the town of 300, but they are normally pretty small. He said the latest was ‘the biggest one I’ve seen’ and ‘gave me a bit of a chill’.
As the sky darkened ahead of the storm, Leaim put his drone up in the air and captured some stunning images of the dust that was about to engulf the town, located some 300 kilometres south of Mount Isa.
“I was waiting for roofs to be flown off,” he told Farmonline. “It was about five to 10 minutes it came through … the winds were just unreal and then we had seven millimetres of rain after it.”
Incredibly, Leaim says there wasn’t much damage from Sunday’s event according to Leaim.
“There were 100km/hr wind gusts – it was blowing pretty hard and the kids were panicking a bit because they had never experienced anything like it before – it did look pretty scary,” Leaim told Farmonline. “When it was going over there was no blue sky – it was sort of like you were in a cattle yard and all the dust was being stirred up.”
He said the dust storm enveloped an estimated 300km radius affecting Mount Isa and other surrounding towns like Dajarra and Urandangi.
Bureau of Meteorology meteorologist Pieter Claassen Sunday afternoon’s storm manifested into a wide storm front which travelled to the top of the Northern Territory.
A dust storm happens when strong wind picks up dust and dirt from the ground, raises it into the atmosphere and carries it over an extensive area. Dust storms can trigger health problems for some people and cause disruption to transport due to poor visibility.
Farmonline reports that dust can travel hundreds of kilometres from its source when it is carried along in strong upper-level winds. Source areas for dust include deserts and dry lakes. For example, when dust affects Sydney, the dust can be carried from as far away as the Strzelecki Desert or Lake Eyre basin in South Australia, or Queensland’s Channel Country, while if Melbourne sees dust, it’s usually from the Mallee-Riverina region.
At the end of October, a huge dust storm hit the Outback town of Thargomindah, and experts have previously warned that they will become increasingly common.
We were staying at Cobar NSW caravan park in 2018 when a dust storm hit.
Visibility went down to around 100 meters at its worst with vehicles needing their headlights on to be seen.
I can remember as a youngster in Broken Hill in the early 1950S a dust storm as we were about to leave school. We were all kept in class until is cleared.We didn’t get out until 5-30 and it was still hard to breath on the way home
It was probably on its way down to Bedourie, whose name means dust storms or something of the like.