I Guess Tumbleweeds Are The Latest Winter Driving Hazard

Workers dig cars out from a tangle of tumbleweeds on
New Year's Day in Washington State. 

It sucks to be a motorist in much of the nation, and the Northern Hemisphere, for that matter, during the winter.

There's always the risk of snow, sleet, freezing rain, high winds, flooding, intense cold or other problems to prevent you from getting from here to there.

Add tumbleweeds to this hazard list.  No, us Vermonters need not worry about that during this or any winter. However, motorists up in Washington State had to deal with this, big time.

As NBC reports:

"A few people in Washington state spent part of their New Year's Eve trapped in their cars after winds blew a massive amount of tumbleweeds onto a highway.

The incident happened on Highway 240 in Benton County near Yakima, a city about 150 miles southeast of Tacoma. Washington State Patro Trooper Chris Thorson told NBC News that 911 calls started to come in around 6:30 p.m about people trapped in their vehicles.

He said winds that night were between 40 to 50 mph and it took about 30 minutes for the tumbleweeds to fully encase five cars and partially trap a semi-truck. The highway in both directions was closed for more than 10 hours in order for the tumbleweeds to be removed."

Thorson told the Seattle Times that occupants of the cars trapped in tumbleweeds "were not as amused as the rest of the people watching. Some of them had to ring in their New Year fully encased in tumbleweeds."

People think of Washington State as wet, and not prone to arid location hazards like tumbleweeds. But eastern Washington where the tumbleweed attack took place is dry because the Cascade Mountains to the west of this location block so much of that moisture coming in from the Pacific Ocean.

Yakima, Washinton, near where this took place, only averages about nine inches of rain per year, compared to the roughly 37 inches wet Seattle, Washington on the Pacific coast gets.

Here's a clip of people trying to rescue vehicles and clear the tumbleweeds:

Cool "Tumbleweed Tornado" in Albuquerque

 Zillions of tumbleweeds in the air amid a New Mexico dust devil, or
more accurately, tumbleweed devil. Cool! 

Dust devils, those whirls of air that happens sometime in dry, windy, sunny weather are pretty common in arid areas of New Mexico.

Sometimes, there's an added dimension, like this really neat, I guess I would call it a "tumbleweed devil" near Albuquerque, New Mexico last week.

Watch:

"Hairy Panic" Of Australian Tumbleweeds Buries Part of Town

"Hairy panic" tumbleweeds engulf the entrance
to this Australian house. 

Combine a really nasty drought and a farmer who doesn't maintain his property very well in Australia and you get something called "Hairy Panic"

According to the BBC, people in a row of homes in Wangaratta, in northeastern Victoria province in Australia, have been spending several hours each day cleaning the tumbleweeds from their homes. Sometimes the "hairy panic" reaches to roof levels

Hairy panic is one species of a grass found throughout Australia. This species has long hairs along the edges of its leaves, hence the name.

Under the drought conditions, the hairy panic dries out, forms into tumbleweeds and blows around until caught by obstructions, like houses.

Property maintenance can be a chore, but imagine having to spend several hours a day cleaning up the mess of hairy panic? And what do you do with this stuff?

A woman stands waist deep in
"hairy panic" tumbleweeds at her Australian home.

And we were I live in Vermont thought shoveling snow off the driveway can be a pain in the ass. Besides, the snow here eventually melts away. You can't say the same for hairy panic.

"It's physically draining and mentally more draining, said resident Pam Twitchett in an interview with Prime7 News in Australia.  

The local town council said it can't help because the hairy panic is not considered a fire threat. (Judging from the pictures, I beg to differ. Imagine what it would look like if you put a lighted match to this stuff?)

No word from the farmer, either, on whether his lack of property maintenance is contributing to the problem.

Here's a wild news report of the wild panic drought tumbleweed crisis:

"It's physically draining and mentally more draining," resident Pam Twitchett told Prime7 News Albury.

Also known by its Latin name Panicum effusum, it is a grass that is found in every Australian state 

It's called "hairy" because while there are a number of other Panicum species, none have long hairs along the edges of their leaves

It grows rapidly and can form tumbleweeds which are dead grass with seeds inside designed to disperse them for reproduction

It can cause a potentially fatal condition called "yellow big head" in sheep if eaten in large quantities

Wangaratta veterinary surgeon Richard Evans told the BBC the weed would lose its toxicity once it dried up.

"The important thing is it's not going to kill people's dogs and cats, it just makes a hell of a mess," he said.

Authorities are unable to help with the clean-up because the tumbleweeds do not pose a fire threat, reports say.

Thousands of Tumbling Tumbleweeds Tumble In Montana

When tumbleweeds attack: Thousands of 'em in Montana.

It was a really windy week in Montana.

In one town, 50 mph winds sent thousands of tumbleweeds rolling, and it looks like a stampede. I'd hate to see the spot where they eventually stopped and piled up.

The tumbleweed attack accompanied a cold front that dropped the temperature by 19 degrees in 19 minutes. 

The West is going to continue stormy over the next few days, so western areas that have a lot of tumbleweeds might see similar scenes, who knows?

Watch:

More Totally Amazing Views of Dust Devils, Tumbleweeds, Tornadoes and Fires

I know I featured a couple posts in the past couple of weeks of dust devils,  tumbleweeds and other dry climate stuff doing amazing things, if only to give us a break from the endless discussions of winter weather.

But wait! There's more!

For fans of weather porn, (the viewing of photos and videos of severe, large or weird storms, no nudity!) we have more.

From Twitter, we got a photo,  originating from @KOB4, shows an enormous dust devil near Las Vegas, New Mexico recently.

(The New Mexico town is not to be confused with the glittery gambling Nevada city.)

This has to be the most humongous dust devil I've ever seen.

Most dust devils don't have strong enough winds to cause damage, but a few do. I bet if this huge
dust devil had hit any of the buildings in the foreground, there would have been damage.

Luckily, no structural damage was reported.

Next, we have a video of a controlled burn at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Colorado, to get rid of some brush.

Or, at least it WOULD have been a controlled burn had the big dust devil not come along to stir up a ton of tumbleweeds, set them aflame, and spread the blaze all over the place.

Luckily, the crew got things under control a little while later, and the so-called control burn didn't scorch THAT much more land than it should have.

The video is next but warning: The idiot who posted the video decided screaming death metal music would be the perfect accompanyment to the visuals. So turn the volume to mute before watching.

Your ears will thank you, and you'll still get your weather porn fix:




Finally, we have a spectacular tornado in Mexico that struck Saturday. Quite the spectacle:

Tumbleweed Connection: And Easterners Thought The Snow Accumulation Was Bad

Yes, I know, you winter weary achy backed snow shovelers in the Midwest and Northeast. You can't bear to clear one more flake of snow after shoveling your driveway day after day, week after week for months.  

A Colorado neighborhood buried in tumbleweeds
earlier this week. 

But it could be worse! Yes, it could!  You could live in the community of Fountain, near Colorado Springs.

Residents there returned home from work one day last week to find tumbleweeds piled up to 10 feet high against their houses. 

They couldn't get in or out.

These tumbleweeds have been a particularly terrible problem in windblown, drought stricken areas of the western United States this winter.

And what do you do with the mess? It's not like the tumbleweeds are going to melt eventually. Plus, they could catch fire and cause a nasty wildfire. The snow in your driveway is not going to cause a fire, trust me.

For now, the residents have piled the the tumbleweeds in a common area, but if the wind blows in the wrong direction, it could pile them against the houses again.

Tumbleweeds have become a real problem in the western United States this winter. They grew like crazy, especially in areas that got a lot of rain last summer. Then it got dry, and they're blowing around and piling up and getting to be a nasty headache.

You could burn them, but only if it's not dry or windy out.  The city of Kennewick, in eastern Washington suggests stomping them or using  heavy duty string trimmer to break them into bits so you can somewhat more easily dispose of them in the trash.

Some cities are spending weeks and many thousands of dollars with heavy equipment trying to get rid of the tumbleweed invasion, which is the worst in memory for a lot of Western towns.

It was as bad as it gets recently in Clovis, New Mexico, as you can see from this incredible local news vieo out of New Mexico:



Here's the local news clip from Colorado: