Tumbleweeds roll in and blanket parts of US city

The gnarled icon of the Old West – ominously featured in movies as gunslingers square-off on dusty streets and townsfolk shake behind curtained windows – rolled in over the weekend and kept rolling until blanketing some homes and streets in parts of Utah.

Crews on Tuesday continued to plough, load and haul the twisted and dried tumbleweeds from neighbourhoods in South Jordan, four days after scores of the beachball-sized plants were bounced in by heavy winds.

“People woke up Saturday morning and it looked like these huge walls had been erected made of tumbleweed,” said Dawn Ramsey, South Jordan’s mayor. “We had entire streets in some of our neighbourhoods completely blocked. They wrapped around homes.”

Saturday’s tumbleweed takeover of South Jordan is not isolated, but it is also not a fiendish plan by the invasive Russian thistle to conquer the western United States.

Instead, the occurrences are due to combinations of seasonal wet and dry weather, the death cycle of the plants and strong gusts that propel them.

Native to south-eastern Russia and western Siberia, the Russian thistle and other plants like it are believed to have been introduced into the US by Russian immigrants as a contaminant in flax seed, according to a tumbleweed abatement programme through the Los Angeles County Department of Agriculture.

They start out as live, green plants that soak up rainwater and grow. As the soil dries, the thistle dies and detaches from the root. The ball then is moved around by the wind and breezes.

“All through the night and through the early morning we had high winds,” said Chris Williams, who lives in South Jordan and used his aerial drone to take video and photos of the tumbleweed.

“They were gathering everywhere, under cars and trucks and trailers. We’ve seen tumbleweed in the area before (but) that was an anomaly.”

Many people used shovels to remove the tumbleweed from in front of their homes, he added.

“I don’t think anybody was in real harm,” said Mr Williams, 65. “I still think you could walk through them if you had to. Tumbleweeds are not real heavy.”

In 2014, mini-storms of tumbleweeds swamped the drought-stricken prairie of southern Colorado, blocking rural roads and irrigation canals, and briefly barricading homes and a school. Parts of Victorville, California, nearly were buried in 2018 by large balls of the dried weeds.

Crews had nearly completed the clean-up on Tuesday afternoon as about 13 loads of tumbleweed had been taken to landfill.