The Dust Bowl, also known as “the Dirty Thirties,” started in 1930 and lasted for about a decade, but its long-term economic impacts on the region lingered much longer.
The worst dust storm occurred on April 14, 1935. News reports called the event Black Sunday. A wall of blowing sand and dust started in the Oklahoma Panhandle and spread east. As many as three million tons of topsoil are estimated to have blown off the Great Plains during Black Sunday.