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VIDEO: Lubbock Goes Dark As Dust Storm Swallows City

As we've seen before this year, when a "haboob" rolls over a city the results can be awesome — and not in a good way if you're caught in it.

Monday afternoon in Lubbock, Texas, a massive dust storm turned day into night in less than a minute. Check this video from local TV station KLBK and The Associated Press (which loops once).

The Lubock Avalanche-Journal says "the gusty wall of dirt that blew into the city about 5:30 p.m. Monday was apparently beyond anything that had been seen here for decades."

The newspaper adds that:

"National Weather Service forecaster Matt Ziebell said employees at NWS had pulled out some pictures from the Dust Bowl era and compared them with some of the photographs taken Monday by local people.

" 'They were dead ringers to some of them,' he said."

There are readers' photos on the Avalanche-Journal's Facebook page. And there's a Storyful collection of videos here.

Several thousand customers lost power after the storm, but there were no reports of serious injuries, according to the Avalanche-Journal.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.