Mama Nature Unleashes Dust Storm Causing Chaos In The Treasure Valley

At 7:14pm I was sitting inside Albertsons Market Street in Meridian enjoying an orange jalapeno margarita when the National Weather Service issued an alert that hit everyone's phones: "DUST STORM WARNING for this area until 7:45PM MDT. Be ready for sudden drop to zero visibility..." I left the the store just five minutes later and boy was the warning accurate. I was struggling alongside a ton of other people just to get through the parking lot to the car.

While visibility was definitely lower with all the dust, the wind was really doing damage knocking out power in several traffic lights including Ustick and Center Point and Ustick and Ten Mile.

The Maverick on Ten Mile and Ustick also suffered an outage. It was eerie to drive by and see it without power. Like a scary movie.

In fact, multiple neighborhoods and traffic lights were hit with power outages. Power at my house was knocked out and didn't return until close to 11pm. And while some traffic lights are still out this morning, it's important to remember to treat those intersections as four way stops until power returns. I was almost T-boned (by a car. No one threw a steak at my face) on my way home yesterday because some drivers don't know this.

Thankfully it seems today we won't be contending with this disaster again:

Be safe out there, folks. Mother Nature is an unpredictable broad. Next week she's giving us 8 days of 100+ degree weather and who knows what else. I think she's mad at us.