Have You Ever Been In A Haboob? I Have.

I moved to Florida just about 2 years ago. I’m originally from a town in west Texas called Lubbock. I wasn’t born there, I was born in San Diego so I’m actually a Cali boy. But the east coast is suiting me just fine too.

Lubbock is in the flattest part of Texas, and possibly America, called the Panhandle. Just like Florida’s panhandle, but less trees, and hills, and water, and scenery, and cities...you get the point. But its not just flat. Its also extremely windy. In fact of the windiest cities in America, Lubbock ranks 8th overall, while Chicago doesn’t even crack the top 20. Part of that is because the winds that blow over the top of the Rockies in New Mexico then comes racing down those slopes into the extremely flat land that stretches across a large chunk of Texas, with Lubbock right in the middle.

So take a super flat area, with huge winds, and surround it with mostly dead and sandy desert like areas all around, and you get haboobs. Yes that’s the actual weather term for it and its hilarious to hear weather people say it on TV a lot. This is just the most recent haboob to hit what was my city.

Now in this video its hard to tell there’s any kind of town around, but there is. In fact Lubbock has almost a quarter million people living there. Add to that Texas Tech University with an additional 30,000 or so, and its no one horse town. (Sidebar: Texas Tech is where Patrick Mahomes played college ball before joining the Chiefs, and where I graduated too so there’s that.) But that’s how bad these storms can get. You can’t even see across your own street to the neighbors house. Yes the block out the sun, with dust.

Here are some pics I took myself when I lived there. The first is a haboob just 5 days before Christmas. The next 2 were from right in front of my house, and the other 2 were seeing one coming over the tops of buildings, ominously looming over the world.

0 of 5