Premiere:

History Channel, October 12, 2008

Executive Producer: Steven Engel

Producers: Amy Bucher, Heidi Burke Associate Producers: Ryan Dismukes, William Acks

Director of Reenactments: Reuben Aaronson

Reenactment Coordinator: Rachael Profiloski

Writer: Amy Bucher

Editors: Virginie Danglades, Mike Perusse

Assistant Editor/Post Production Coordinator: Julio Lastres

Composer: Michael Josephs

Director of Photography: Reuben Aaronson, Chris Towey

Production Manager: Marcie Baeza

History Channel Programming Coordinator: Kelly Vorrasi

History Channel Executive Producer:

Susan Werbe

For more information:

http://shop.history.com/detail.php?p=74016

Synopsis

For ten long years in the 1930s, a new kind of killer storm ravaged the American Heartland. Towering walls of dust thousands of feet high, hundreds of miles wide - rolling mountains of dirt that turned day into night, enveloping everything in their path. They were called Black Blizzards, and in under a decade, their power stripped 850 million tons of topsoil from the Great Plains and destroyed a hundred million acres of farmland, creating a desert in the middle of America. One of the worst storms, known as Black Sunday, hit on April 14th, 1935.

More than a mile high and 200 miles wide - the earth had taken to the sky. People of the southern plains of America, had to cope with unimaginable conditions for a decade. With no way to avoid it, overwhelming concentrations of dust began to take a terrible toll on their health. A silent killer emerged - dust pneumonia. Children were especially vulnerable. To this day, it is the worst environmental disaster in America, and what few people know: it was entirely man made.

Now, a team of experts are investigating this forgotten chapter in history, the story of the Dust Bowl - a time of unimaginable horror of unbearable heat and suffocating dirt clouds, of sickness and starvation, of plagues and other unnatural phenomenon a time when the earth rose up and fought back, darkening the skies for a decade.

Tim Egan, author of The Worst Hard Times, a recent book about the Dust Bowl years, has joined forces with special FX engineer Randy Moore, soil scientist Clay Robinson, lung specialist Dr. Robert Cohen and electrostatics specialist William Beatty to examine these dust storms, by recreating the forces behind them and experiencing them first hand. On a plateau in northeast New Mexico, the team uses two 500 horsepower wind machines and 20,000 pounds of special effects dust to create a modern day Black Blizzard. Tim Egan puts himself directly in its path.

Black Blizzard is also a story of endurance, the story of farm families who clung to their land though it had betrayed them, who put their heads down, prayed for rain, and struggled to survive an apocalypse. Through dramatic cinematic reenactments, vivid recollections from living bring the hellish decade of the Dust Bowl back to life.