‘Crazy gross rain’ from Texas dust storm dirties cars from Missouri through Ohio Valley

A dust storm swept across El Paso, Texas Thursday afternoon making for orange skies.

ST. LOUIS — Residents from the Midwest into the Ohio Valley got an unpleasant surprise when they went outside after overnight rain showers Saturday morning to find instead of their cars being washed clean, they were now covered in a grimy film.

“We had crazy gross rain last night,” X user @wxKobold posted on the platform Saturday morning from Truxton, Missouri. “My window was difficult to clean this morning!”

A car sits coated in a muddy residue after dust combined with rain over Truxton, Missouri on March 8, 2025.

(@wxKobold / X)

What was the culprit? Blame Thursday’s dust storm hundreds of miles away!

Wide swaths of Texas and Eastern New Mexico were blasted by a massive dust storm Thursday as winds gusting well over 60 mph swept across the arid deserts. Thick clouds of dust turned the skies an eerie orange from El Paso to Dallas as the wall of wind pushed through.

Skies turn an eerie red over the Dallas-Fort Worth area during a major dust storm on March 4, 2025.

(FOX 4)

WATCH: DUST TURNS SKIES EERIE RED OVER DALLAS AS 60-MPH WIND BLAST METROPLEX

But the dust didn’t stop there.  Reports starting coming in of vehicles mysteriously coated in dirt from St. Louis and Missouri, through Illinois and even as far away as Charleston, West Virginia.

Satellite analysis by meteorologists with the National Weather Service office in St. Louis traced the dust from Texas sweeping across Oklahoma and climbing into the middle layers of the lower atmosphere across southeastern Kansas into Missouri and Illinois.

Scattered showers from the lingering storm mixed with this layer of dust, turning typically clean raindrops into essentially drops of mud.

But the “dirty rain” didn’t stop there.  The dust kept right on going through Kentucky and into West Virginia.