Bone-dry winds tore across parts of Texas and New Mexico, kicking up dust storms and causing dangerous driving conditions, as forecasters said the risk of fires breaking out in the parched region would persist into Wednesday.
Blowing dust reduced visibility to near zero around Lubbock, Tex., as it moved into southwest Oklahoma on Tuesday night, the National Weather Service said. Parts of the Texas Panhandle and Oklahoma were under blowing dust warnings until early Wednesday.
The authorities in New Mexico urged people to avoid driving through the severe dust storms that hit the state on Tuesday. Poor visibility because of the dust had led to dangerous driving conditions and some road closures, according to New Mexico’s Transportation Department.
The Weather Service’s bureau in Norman, Okla., said on social media that visibility would drop to half a mile or less, especially in southwest Oklahoma, on Tuesday night, making travel “extremely hazardous.”
Severe weather and crashes led to the closure of a stretch of Highway 54, in the village of Ruidoso, N.M., about 65 miles west of Roswell, according to the authorities.
More than 35,000 customers were without power in New Mexico and Texas on Tuesday night, according to PowerOutage.us, a tracking website. In a notice on its website, PNM, a power provider in New Mexico, told customers to prepare for outages because of the severe weather.
A red flag warning, indicating a high risk that fires could start or spread, was in place for parts of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois until Thursday.
Wind gusts of over 60 miles per hour were forecast for parts of Texas’s Panhandle and northwest overnight, according to the Weather Service, with the potential for new fires and continued dust storms. The wind direction was expected to shift in some areas tonight in the southern Plains, which could create challenges for firefighters.
Damaging winds were also expected to pick up in Oklahoma and West Kansas.
In Texas, a fire near Borger in Hutchinson County broke out on Tuesday evening and quickly spread to 350 acres, prompting evacuation orders for some residents, according to officials.
Another fire in a largely agricultural area in northern Dallam County more than doubled, to about 15,000 acres, and was 50 percent contained by Tuesday night, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service. The authorities in the area shut down roads because of low visibility from blowing dust and wildfire smoke.
