Attack of the monster tumbleweeds

Associated Press

KENNEWICK – A little neighborhood on the edge of the Horse Heaven Hills has been attacked by tumbleweeds, some of them “as big as Buicks.”

Kim Taverniti-Martyn, a newcomer from Spokane, was transfixed by the sight.

“You should have seen them coming over the hills,” she said Tuesday. “It was like the attack of the killer tumbleweeds.”

The rolling Russian thistle skittered across the desert driven by 30 mph winds over the weekend, blocking driveways and doorways and piling up against fences.

“It was just like being snowed in – but it was tumbleweeds,” said Jim Aust, who has lived at the south end of Olympia Street for 26 years.

On Tuesday, city and county crews went after the giant tumbleweeds with fire, burning them up with propane torches and leaving a light layer of ash over the neighborhood.

“Some of these were as big as Buicks,” said Jill Raebel, whose home was among those beset.

Neither she nor neighbor Fred Rexus believes the problem is solved. They suspect that a fallow wheat field nearby has become a tumbleweed farm.

“The next wind and we are going to have a repeat,” Rexus said.

Others believe the tumbleweed population explosion is the result of a wildfire that cleared sagebrush from a large patch of land a few years ago, inviting the thistle to take root.

The battle against the prickly tumbleweeds is getting old, Aust said.

“They are obnoxious to handle,” said Aust, whose driveway has been charred by burn piles. “They break off in your hand. You almost have to wear welding gloves to keep them from penetrating.”

Kennewick City Councilman Paul Parish said there’s not a lot the council can do.

“It’s kind of an act of God thing,” he said.

The tumblin’ tumbleweeds of the windswept Columbia River Basin have bedeviled people at the nearby Hanford nuclear reservation for decades. Crews with pitchforks routinely round up truckloads of tumbleweeds – unless monitors indicate they are radioactive. Then, specially suited and trained workers are called in to dispose of the tumbleweeds. Fewer than 1 percent of the tumbleweeds at Hanford, the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site, show any radioactivity, officials said.

Russian thistle, which is not native to the Columbia Basin, is a particular problem at underground burial sites for radioactive waste, where the tap root can reach down as far as 20 feet and suck up such elements such as strontium and cesium.

But even the tumbleweeds that aren’t contaminated can be a nuisance, clogging stairwells and work sites.

Each winter, the plant’s tap root decays and the spiny skeleton breaks off and blows away. With a stiff winter wind, a tumbleweed can travel for miles before finding a place to settle.