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15ft tumbleweeds trap drivers and force Washington state road closure
11–20 of 61 posts
Re: 15ft tumbleweeds trap drivers and force Washington state road closure
#12The title is misleading. The individual tumbleweeds are only a couple feet in diameter. It was a 15ft pile of tumbleweeds.
Re: 15ft tumbleweeds trap drivers and force Washington state road closure
#13My 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?
Re: 15ft tumbleweeds trap drivers and force Washington state road closure
#14It 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-... covering walls of a few houses. There are some specific underpasses that get covered every year as well.
Re: 15ft tumbleweeds trap drivers and force Washington state road closure
#15Cliff 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…
Every time this happens, people start telling these stories.
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.
Re: 15ft tumbleweeds trap drivers and force Washington state road closure
#16I 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 habit…
For example, Racoons: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-overrun...
> 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.
Re: 15ft tumbleweeds trap drivers and force Washington state road closure
#17I 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 habit…
...Australia?
We have cane toads. Lots of cane toads. We used to have cane toad drives when I was a kid to stop the spread south. We would fill up wheelie bins full of them and freeze them. Must people just used cricket bats.
In the end we lost. There were just too many of them.
Re: 15ft tumbleweeds trap drivers and force Washington state road closure
#18Cliff 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…
Radioactive tumbleweeds sound like a Hannah Barbara cartoon.
Re: 15ft tumbleweeds trap drivers and force Washington state road closure
#19Cliff 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…
Radioactive tumbleweeds sound like a Hannah Barbara cartoon.
Thundarr the Barbarian!
Re: 15ft tumbleweeds trap drivers and force Washington state road closure
#20This 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.