Oklahoma Panhandle

Highway 95 had to be cleared of mud and debris.

So today, that upper level low is going to grab even more moisture, starting to fuel from Polo as it makes its landfall later in Mexico, second landfall, and ends up dropping a ton of water on New Mexico, southeastern Arizona, over into the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma Panhandle, and even the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Colorado and even southwest Kansas.

That's a level three out of four.

That means you get one to two inch per hour rainfall rates through the day today through tonight and that adds up quickly.

It started picking up the ground itself, the actual soil the plains were made of, the same dirt that had held those fields together for ten thousand years, now airborne.

As Timothy Egan writes, "A family who'd built a life on the strength of the 1920s boom was learning a hard lesson in real time." Fred Fokkers, a farmer in the Oklahoma Panhandle, had ridden the wartime wheat economy from a rocky Missouri hillside into a new house, a new Dodge, and a piano for his daughter, Fay, bought on credit, ten dollars down and ten dollars a month.

When the price of wheat cratered, Fokkers didn't stop farming.

He plowed more.

An Associated Press reporter named Robert Geiger happened to be traveling through the region that day with a photographer chasing down material for a story about the storms that had been battering the plains all winter.

The field dispatch Geiger filed the next morning would coin the name for the disaster.

Geiger's story, written from the Oklahoma Panhandle the day after the storm, opened with a weary line.

It said, "Residents of the southwestern Dust Bowl had marked up another black duster and wondered how long it would be before the next one came." Geiger used the term Dust Bowl as a description, not a title.

Hello and welcome to Founded, where we find the stories you missed in history class because the tea was hot before they dumped it into the harbor.

I'm Tori Phantom and joining me today is someone who might have actually handled pans on the Oklahoma panhandle, Gwena Laithland.

I've definitely handled pans

in the Oklahoma panhandle.

I've been to Beaver and I did a science demonstration for lovely little children at a library in Beaver, Oklahoma, which is in the panhandle.

I always like to imagine that the Oklahoma panhandle is like very short distance.

Like you could stand on one edge of it and see the other edge, like, cause it's that small on the map.

So in my head, you could just throw a rock and hit the other side.

You're listening to NPR.

Weather forecasters have issued flash flood watches and warnings for eastern New Mexico, western Texas, and the Oklahoma Panhandle.

Heavy monsoon rains have inundated much of New Mexico with several rounds of heavy rain.

The New York sex crimes case of former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein came to a close yesterday.

When we push this out to the two week, now this gets into October 8th and this is accumulated precipitation over the two week period.

You can see here, again, the GFS dry through most of the western part of Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle, the Texas panhandle, and much of Colorado.

But the eastern parts of those states are expected to get rain over the next two weeks.

Again, this is the GFS.

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Hank Martin and his wife looked stunned as they sat in the living room of their home in the Oklahoma panhandle country.

Facing them sat Lem Garner, president of the bank in the nearby town of Batesville, and Jim West, the sheriff.

Hank said.

Uh, there were so many of them at the time.

And the, the day before on September 10th, we were out, uh, driving around in the Texas Panhandle, um, near the Oklahoma Panhandle.

Uh-

Were you looking for tornadoes?

100 degrees plus.

Oklahoma Panhandle is hosting Shriner in a 9-D-3 matchup, and that's 101 degrees.

Look at Texas Lutheran and Southwestern, 100 degrees.

McMurray and Trinity, 100 degrees.

Well, I want to talk to Garrett.

When Garrett's ready for us in a minute here, I think he played in the Oklahoma area.

So I wonder if he played in that 100-plus degree heat that we're seeing in that Shriner-Oklahoma panhandle game.

Of course he