It was a day unlike any other in the recorded history of the San Joaquin Valley. Winds that nearly reached 200 miles an hour...25 million tons of topsoil gone in a single day, and dust clouds that dimmed the sun from Bakersfield all the way to Reno. Today on KVPR’s Central Valley Roots – 1977’s great Kern County dust storm.
1977 had been one of the driest years on record in California. So on December 20th when unusually high pressure over the Great Basin met with an offshore low, the conditions were ripe for an extreme weather event.
As the day went on, winds began to howl, blowing from the desert, through the Tehachapi mountains into the Southern San Joaquin Valley. The community of Arvin was ground zero. The weather station there captured winds of 88 miles an hour before it broke. The U.S. Geological Survey later estimated gusts in Arvin reached 192 miles an hour. The National Weather Service reports the winds created a wall of dust over 5,000 feet high over the city.
By the following day, the storm was over, but the damage was staggering:
Five people were dead. Canals and freeway underpasses were filled with sand. Cars had their paint stripped to bare metal. Damages topped $34 million dollars, and according to the weather service, 70 percent of homes in Arvin, Edison and East Bakersfield had structural damage. The impact of the storm even continued into 1978, as cases of valley fever spiked, well into Northern California. That’s because the storm had spread fungal spores from Kern County’s soil as far as 400 miles away. While there have been other big dust storms in the valley since, none have come close to rivaling the scale or intensity of the one that hit Kern County just before Christmas in 1977.
