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15ft tumbleweeds trap drivers and force Washington state road closure
- tus88 7y agoSomehow I don't think that truck is "trapped".
- winrid 7y agoProbably not. But also probably unwise to drive if you can't see...
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoHe could probably see just fine when he stopped. That picture is taken hours later after many tumbleweeds have piled up to the point of it becoming a newsworthy event. I think being reluctant to crunch the stopped Prius (or whatever) in front of him is why he doesn't proceed.
- winrid 7y agoYeah, now that you mention it of course he was stopped by the people in front of him :)
- teslabox 7y agoI heard tumbleweeds are an invasive species. Wikipedia seems to confirm: "Kali tragus [...] is an annual plant that breaks off at the stem base when it dies, and forms a tumbleweed, dispersing its seeds as the wind rolls it along. It is said to have arrived in the United States in shipments of flax seeds to South Dakota, perhaps about 1870. It now is a noxious weed throughout North America, dominating disturbed habitats such as roadsides, cultivated fields, eroded slopes, and arid regions with sparse vegetation." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbleweed#Plants_that_form_tumbleweeds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbleweed#Plants_that_form_tu... These are the western equivalent of Kudzu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu_in_the_United_States I wonder if there any species from the Americas that are invasive to Europe/Africa/Asia... ?
- Scarblac 7y agoIn the Netherlands at least, an American species of freshwater crayfish has almost completely replaced the native species and its ecosystem is unprepared for it. And grey squirrels in the UK, of course. There must be more.
- swarnie_ 7y agoSimilar situation in the UK, we used to haul crayfish out of our sailing lake each year by the boatload.
- smackay 7y agoAmerican freshwater crayfish infest all the rice fields here in Portugal. They cause a lot of damage to irrigation and drainage ditches but the number of things that eat them is enormous. It's probably the major reason White Storks here no longer migrate to Africa in the winter. At Vila Franca de Xira, near Lisboa, when the rice is harvested in October, you can see hundreds of thousands of ibis, herons, gulls, flamingos, egrets, spoonbills, storks, waders and everything else you can think of eating crayfish of all sizes.
- rascul 7y agoMud bugs and squirrels can make good meals, so there's an appetizing way of fighting back.
- alexott 7y agoFor example, Racoons: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-overrun-by-raccoon-invasion-a-847847.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-overrun...
- LockAndLol 7y ago> Some residents fight back with steel traps or poisonous gas. Some even eat the comical pests, which are said to taste best marinated with celeriac and onions. That's a nice "fuck you" to racoons . Free food.
- blackoil 7y agoFrom the story. In 2018, tumbleweed swamped a town. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/18/attack-of-the-giant-tumbleweed-california-town-swamped-in-invasion https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/18/attack-of-th... Would be pretty scary thing to wake up to.
- philiplu 7y agoCliff Mass, a meteorology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle blogged about this last Friday[1]. There's a comment[2] from someone in the area who notes that some of those tumbleweeds were likely radioactive, since this is downwind of the Hanford Site[3], a relic from the Manhattan Project and later Cold War which has been leaking radioactive waste for decades. [1] https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-meteorology-of-tumbleweed-storm.html https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-meteorology-of-tu... [2] https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-meteorology-of-tumbleweed-storm.html?showComment=1578110638732#c3173872887216332904 https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-meteorology-of-tu... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
- stonogo 7y agoEvery time this happens, people start telling these stories. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-15-me-51273-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-15-me-51273... Out of approximately 10k tumblweeds tested per year, approximately 20 per year are found to be radioactive, for values of radioactive approximating one CT scan. So even if you drag a geiger counter out there to find a hot one, then cuddle it for a while, it isn't as interesting as the campfire stories make it out to be.
- justinclift 7y agoGuessing the mutation rate in the seeds from the radioactive ones will be higher than normal?
- JulianMorrison 7y agoYes but most mutations just break stuff.
- pts_ 7y agoRadioactive tumbleweeds sound like a Hannah Barbara cartoon.
- duelingjello 7y agoPaging Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t to Youtube some non-moss gathering desert flora outside of Chile.
- foreigner 7y agoThe title is misleading. The individual tumbleweeds are only a couple feet in diameter. It was a 15ft pile of tumbleweeds.
- draw_down 7y agoCome on
- TwoNineFive 7y agoBut but but "journalism"! You're talking to the fourth-estate here, have some respect!
- netgusto 7y agoMy risk avoidance systems detects danger in staying in the car within the pile of tumbleweeds, as I expect them to be easily flammable; isn't that the case?
- itronitron 7y agoyes, they are extremely flammable although likely to completely burn up within a minute or two as they don't have a lot of mass when dried out not sure whether it is safer to exit the car and risk getting hit by another vehicle or risk being stuck under a burning pile
- siffland 7y agoI don't know, I saw this on an Outer Limits episode once, those tumbleweeds are up to no good or maybe they are trying to communicate....... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cry_of_Silence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cry_of_Silence
- viraptor 7y agoIt gets interesting when the wind ends up blowing just the right way. This was in Australia: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/feb/18/fast-growing-tumbleweed-called-hairy-panic-blows-into-australian-city https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/feb/18/fast-... covering walls of a few houses. There are some specific underpasses that get covered every year as well.
- tallanvor 7y agoThis happened in Benton County, and tumbleweeds are basically the one thing that you're still allowed to dispose of by burning in the cities there. --When I was a child it was common to also burn the leaves in autumn, but that's been illegal since around 2000 or so, and for a number of years before then they had limited doing this in cities to specified burn days.
- k_sze 7y agoThe article doesn’t talk about it, but is this also a result of climate change?
- joncrane 7y agoI believe that Western Washington is indeed experiencing less rainfall lately.
- reaperducer 7y agoI believe that Western Washington is indeed experiencing less rainfall lately. The local news report that The Guardian lifted its article from was from KAPP-TV, which is in Yakima. Yakima is considered eastern Washington, not west. It is on the dry side of the state where there are farms and desert.
- floren 7y agoSR-240 is firmly on the east side of the state, which is naturally a desert. The road runs through the Hanford site, so there's no agriculture on either side, just sagebrush and tumbleweeds (and elk).
- poulsbohemian 7y agoLifelong Washingtonian here, currently living about an hour from these tumbleweeds... this year has been dry (saw something about 50% less rainfall / snowfall than typical for this time of year...) but tumbleweeds like this are not really that unusual. One of my very earliest memories was being caught in a storm just like this one, just before xmas when I was about two. Much of eastern Washington is scrub, where if it can be irrigated, turns into excellent agricultural land.
- dingo_bat 7y agoThe video of how it is to drive on the road is pretty wild.
- jcadam 7y agoI developed an allergy to tumbleweed whilst living in Colorado. So I moved to the east coast. Ok, it wasn't just because of the tumbleweeds. The sound a tumbleweed makes when it gets caught in your undercarriage and drug down the highway is... annoying. Annoying enough I'd sometimes pull over to remove them (particularly if I'd collected more than one). Couldn't imagine being buried in them :(
- reaperducer 7y agoCouldn't imagine being buried in them :( One of my favorite photos of my wife is where she's trapped inside our car, surrounded by piles of tumbleweeds at a rest stop in Arizona. It was a windy day, and I stopped to use the facilities. When I came out, there she was — frantic behind the glass, not knowing what to do since it was the first time she'd ever seen tumbleweeds. Naturally, I couldn't pass up the photo opportunity.
- faeyanpiraat 7y agoIt would’ve been a perfect onion article if it was not real
- WarOnPrivacy 7y agoBest ball pit
- sparrish 7y agoNo way. Those suckers are all dried up and not 'soft'. They're scratchy and the branches can be sharp when broken. Jump in and you'll come out bleeding. This coming from years of experience cleaning up tumbleweed piles against fences here in Colorado.