Strong winds have blown masses of spiky tumbleweed into homeowners’ yards and streets across Southern California and Utah. Tumbleweed reportedly has piled up to 5 feet high on some homes and has even blocked some homeowners from being able to get out. Sue Jones, a spokeswoman with the city of Victorville, Calif., the epicenter of the latest tumbleweed chaos, says that in some cases tumbleweed was as high as the second floors of homes.
Victorville reportedly had about 150 homeowners battling tumbleweeds last week. Salt Lake City homeowners also faced tumbleweed swarms as the weeds blew across town. Homeowners have been working to clear tumbleweed from suburban properties.
“It’s a nightmare. It’s very irritating,” Bryan Bagwell, a Victorville-based broker at Bryan Bagwell Real Estate, told realtor.com®. He hired two men to remove the tumbleweed from his property, and the process to clear the thorny weeds that had piled up to more than 4.5 feet on some areas of his property took six-and-a-half hours.
“It’s been an ongoing situation. Once every couple of weeks, when the wind blows, we get tumbleweeds,” says Bagwell, who bears scratches on his arms from tumbleweed encounters. “It can be as little as five to 10 tumbleweeds or as many as several hundred tumbleweeds in my yard.”
The dry weeds can also become a fire hazard, so city crews have been busy removing them.
Source: “Tumbleweed Trouble: Homeowners Overrun by Thorny Terrors,” realtor.com® (April 18, 2018)
