An avalanche of fine particles rolled across northwest Indiana and north-central Illinois on Friday, turning day to night in an area of the country rarely hit by dust storms.
A dark cloud suddenly brought near-zero visibility conditions on Friday afternoon to major highways, including Interstates 55 and 57 in Illinois, leading the National Weather Service to fire off a series of warnings about “dangerous, life-threatening” conditions on roads.
As the wave of sifting dust blew into Chicago, it created a dramatic scene. Visibility dropped to a quarter-mile at Chicago Midway International Airport.
“This is not common at all,” Zachary Wack, a meteorologist with the Weather Service office in Romeoville, 30 miles southwest of Chicago, said on Friday.
Friday was the first time that the Weather Service office in Romeoville, which covers a large area that includes Chicago, had ever issued a dust storm warning for the city.
Mr. Wack was working as the first warnings were being issued. Then the dust storm arrived at his office.
“Visibility went from unrestricted to less than a quarter mile in less than 10 minutes,” Mr. Wack said. “It was a brown haze.”
Dust storms can occur anywhere in the United States, but they’re most common in the desert Southwest and across the southern Great Plains, particularly in late winter and early spring.
Deserts, overgrazed land and areas experiencing drought are especially prone to dust storms. Soils across central Illinois are exceptionally dry this spring, and dry soil is easily lifted up into the air by winds.
“And it’s not just the topsoil that’s dry,” said Brian Hurley, a meteorologist with the Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center. “It’s going down a couple meters.”
Mr. Hurley said the soil moisture in the area was at only 2 to 5 percent, making it among the driest ever.
The Weather Service’s Romeoville office, which covers much of Northern Illinois and a sliver of northwest Indiana, has issued dust storm warnings for only one other weather event, which happened in 2023 in an agricultural area. That warning did not include Chicago.
In the 2023 dust storm, seven people died in a crash involving 72 vehicles on Interstate 55 in central Illinois.
Chicago was last affected by a significant dust storm during the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, specifically on May 10, 1934, according to Rafal Ogorek, a forecaster with the Weather Service.
Dust storms also affected portions of the Chicago metro area in April 1935 and on May 31, 1985.
Mr. Ogorek noted that his office could not “find any documentation that suggested that either of those dust storms produced significant visibility reductions.”
The dust storm on Friday formed near Bloomington, Ill., at about 4:30 p.m. local time when thunderstorms in central Illinois generated a push of whipping and howling winds with speeds up to 70 miles per hour.
As the winds surged northward, they swept aloft dust from parched farmland.
A dust storm generated by winds from thunderstorms is called a haboob, a term often used in the Middle East, where dust storms are common.
Thomas Gill, a professor of environmental science and engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso, said it was appropriate to call Friday’s storm a haboob.
Professor Gill said images and videos of Friday’s storm “show the classic appearance of a haboob” with a “wall of dust rolling across the land.”
Traveling at about 60 m.p.h., the dust storm moved into downtown Chicago by about 6:30 p.m.
Dan Belko, 51, who lives in the Old Town section of Chicago, said his wife got a warning about the storm on her phone just as they were stepping outside for dinner.
“You could see the change in the atmosphere,” Mr. Belko said. “It looked like a fog, but not a very thick fog.”
Amy Graff is a Times reporter covering weather, wildfires and earthquakes.
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