My Strange New Mexico

The Day It Rained Milk

Posted on Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 07:49PM by Mike Smith in Column | Post a Comment

The winds gusted in, and the clouds jostled for room, and the sky grew dark over Silver City.

In this southwestern New Mexico town, calendars that afternoon announced the date as Monday, January 7, 2008, though the majority of the town’s more than 10,000 residents were not inside taking note. Instead, they were at their windows, or on their porches, or carefully venturing outdoors, wondering what exactly was happening with the weather and why it appeared to be raining milk.

The air hung cold, and when the clouds began to empty, their rain fell white and opaque, spattering down in gobs and torrents. The rain cascaded like watery paste down cars and roofs and windows, and pooled on the ground in strange, glue-colored puddles. For more than two hours, the streets ran white with what looked like milk, and the albino downpour drenched Silver City as part of an unusual storm that, over the course of a few hours, painted an estimated 200 square miles of the desert white.

The storm poured its whiteness over towns as far west as Duncan, Arizona, and Virden, New Mexico in Hidalgo County; as far east as Santa Clara and San Lorenzo in Grant County; and as far north as Glenwood and Alma in Catron County—causing numerous alarmed locals to call the New Mexico Environment Department, and spurring many others to collect samples for testing.

“It was so unexpected and so unnatural, it made you wonder what new environmental horror we had unleashed,” said Alice Jones, a faculty member of Western New Mexico University (WNMU) in Silver City. “When I stepped outside into the rain, the puddles in the street were as white as milk. ...I at first thought there must have been a volcanic eruption somewhere and this was the ash washing out of the atmosphere. It was a cold day and a lot of people in Silver City heat with wood. A friend speculated it was all the wood smoke. Someone else said it was from a fire in Mexico or Arizona.”

Spooked locals also suggested such causes as clouds of dust and pollution drifting over from China, pollution from Albuquerque or Las Cruces, fires in California, and toxic dust from tailings piles at the Tyrone Mine—an already controversial copper mining operation just south of Silver City. Residents remained suspicious of volcanoes, but they failed to agree on which one could have been the cause. Was it, for instance, the Llaima Volcano down in Chile, which melted snow into floodwater and forced the evacuation of 700 people on January 3 and 4? Or the Shiveluch Volcano, on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, which exploded on December 20, 2007?

The story soon poured onto the Internet, whiting out logic and rationality as it went.

Various websites connected the event to ghosts and ghostly ectoplasm, to UFOs reported over central Texas the following day, to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and to the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a.k.a. HAARP—an Alaska research facility dedicated to the study of the earth’s upper atmosphere, a facility accused by some of affecting the weather. (HAARP, despite being based in Alaska, has also been blamed for causing the Taos Hum.)

Another website implied the rain was loaded with “smartdust”—theorized collectives of semi-mobile microscopic surveillance equipment disguised as dust motes—while others suggested it had something to do with “chemtrails,” the notion that airplanes emit smoky lines of highly toxic poisons in place of normal exhaust as part of a purposeful attempt by the U.S. government to change the earth’s climate and kill off humanity.

“AS THE CHEMTRAILS IN SOME AREAS LEAVES WEBS, MAYBE THEY ARE MORE WATERED DOWN TO MAKE A MILKY SUBSTANCE,” read an online comment posted January 20, 2008 by one of the theory’s most literate proponents. “DAM KILLER PLANES.”

Meanwhile, in the day’s early evening, after the last white drops of the storm crashed against the ground, residents of Silver City and the surrounding area began to assess the bizarre event’s effects, and to try to find some real answers. When the rain dried, it left a white residue described by the January 11, 2008 Las Cruces Sun-News as “almost sticky,” a residue often difficult to remove. Russell Dobkins—a resident of Gila, a small town thirty miles northwest of Silver City—initially thought it seemed to “be eating into the paint of [his] car.”

Every area window appeared coated in the white substance, and line after line of chalky-looking cars rolled along into area carwashes. Understandably worried that the weird storm was the result of dangerous pollution, Dobkins, an organic farmer and biologist, took the matter seriously, contacting state and regional media, working with environmental groups such as the Gila Resource Information Project (GRIP), putting up fliers requesting information, helping send samples of the rain to labs—in El Paso, Texas, in Socorro, and in Albuquerque—and alerting the Gila Regional Hospital to be on the lookout for Valley Fever, a.k.a. coccidioidomycosis, a potentially lethal fungal virus that sometimes accompanies airborne sediment.

“We didn’t know what [the rain] was—if it had come from the mines or what,” Dobkins said. “But what’s cool is we were able to mobilize and deal with it locally, to do the work, and to tell the media, ‘It could be serious, and if it’s a problem, you need to be involved.’”

No plant or animal life appeared harmed by the storm, but a number of area locals soon reportedly complained of flu-like symptoms which they attributed to the dust. And when, about two weeks later, a days-long rainstorm washed much of the suspect powder from the area’s streets down into the Gila River, into water that many locals needed to irrigate their farms and gardens, many people felt concerned.

Most of their worries began to fade though, as test results came back from the labs.

The residue from the rain evidently wasn’t from a volcano, in part because its particles, when examined under a microscope, appeared round and solid like windblown sand, not rough and sharp like volcanic ash. It didn’t seem to be from the Tyrone Mine, because the chemical compositions didn’t quite match up, and because the storm had moved in a northeasterly direction, falling on the town of White Signal before it had reached the mine. And it probably wasn’t from HAARP or from smartdust or from chemtrails, because of...well...Occam’s Razor.

What the evidence did show, however, was that the bizarre white rainfall was likely the result of an enormous dust storm on a dry, salty lakebed (or playa) reported about 120 miles southwest of Silver City, near Willcox, Arizona. There, dust had been swept by high winds into the clouds, mixed with a storm system, moved northeast, and rained down as a watery, white mud. The findings of the various labs and of at least one independent Silver City investigator all seemed to suggest this conclusion is the most likely.

“NMED staff compared metal results from historic data collected in the early 1990s by NMED’s Surface Water Bureau from playa lakes near Lordsburg to the milky rain event and found similar chemical signatures of metals,” wrote NMED’s Jerry Schoeppner, in a recent e-mail. “That comparison strengthened the suspicion that strong winds may have suspended sediment from playa basins that could have mixed with precipitation and created the milky rain. However, regardless of the source, the metals measured from the samples were in a form and concentration that posed a minimal risk to the public.”

Russell Dobkins, and Allyson Siwik of GRIP, served as the impetus and the driving force of the investigation, contacting everyone who might know something or be able to help spread the word. Phil Harrigan, a geoscientist in the Silver City Field Office, helped coordinate efforts to collect and examine samples of the rainwater. Scientists Joel Gilbert and Thomas Gill of the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), along with Bonnie Frey of New Mexico Tech (NMT) in Socorro, and others, all ran analyses of the mysterious residue. And satellite photos obtained from NASA and interpreted by Thomas Gill and New Mexico State University professor Max Bleiweiss even show a plume of dust blowing from the playa northeast toward New Mexico on the morning of the storm.

(Other individuals and organizations helped as well, in many other capacities, and by the time the investigation eventually wound down, toward the end of January, the investigators’ many exchanged e-mails, from which much of the information in this column originated, could have been bound into a small book.)

Accounts also surfaced of similar happenings having occurred elsewhere—such as in Ruidoso, New Mexico, in Idaho, and in South Africa—the causes of which apparently involved dust as well—and the mystery of the white rain, although not definitively solved, seemed at least to have found a likely explanation.

...It found an explanation, but it didn’t lose its strangeness.

Science has taught us that the sun is not a supernatural deity that sinks into the ocean every night, as certain ancient peoples once believed, and today we know the sun is a fiery nuclear dynamo converting hydrogen into helium at unfathomable temperatures on an unfathomable scale—but that doesn’t make its existence any less amazing or any less freaky.

In that same way, we know that the white rain that fell on and around Silver City likely had nothing to do with 1984-influenced nanotechnology or with covertly genocidal airlines, but the event isn’t really any less unusual because of it. A violent dust storm still threw a salt flat into the air. Clouds engorged with white dust still raced from Arizona to New Mexico. And on a day this last January, the streets of Silver City still appeared to be flooded with milk—and the people who saw it happen it still had no idea why or what it was.

The experience remains memorable, and it remains strange.