Utah town has endured violent storms but is now faced with a new problem: the town is overwhelmed with tumbleweeds which have choked the highways, encircled houses, and buried cars.
Residents of South Jordan, located south of the state capital Salt Lake City, are left with the unenviable task of cleaning the huge mounds of weeds, sometimes as high as 10 feet.
Tumbleweeds Swamp Utah Towns, Highways Impassable
The scene is no different in other locations such as in Eagle Mountain, further south, where the residents are left with no other options but to use hoes and shovels to clear the weeds before city personnel came with garbage trucks.
The latest bout of strong winds destroyed city infrastructure, knocked down trees, and damaged roads across Utah.
Winds of more than 100 km/h (65 mph) battered the city and to top off the misery, it started snowing before tumbleweeds ripped through the city, as a cold front brought more severe weather.
Local residents said that they had seen tumbleweeds earlier but never of this magnitude. The tumbleweed misery is, however, not a new phenomenon, and in 2020, drivers in Washington state found themselves wading through 15 ft tumbleweeds, forcing police to close a roadway in both directions.
As reported by US News, In 2018, a tumbleweed storm much similar to the one that struck Utah wreaked havoc in California, bringing the entire town to a screeching halt.
However, what are tumbleweeds which have brought the whole city of Utah to its knees? Tumbleweeds are the bushy part of a Russian invasive weed called thistle, and the plant as such does not cause any problem.
However, when the plant dies, the bushy part gets snapped off at the root and blows away in the wind. It is this dead bushy part which causes all the problems when they blow across the landscape, sometimes even inundating cities altogether.
Tumbleweed storms are quite common in the US as well as Australia. It was in 2016 when a type of tumbleweed dubbed “hairy panic” inundated an entire Australian town.
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