Story originally appeared on USA Today.
A wall of dust hundreds of feet high rolled into the Phoenix area.
A wall of dust, hundreds of feet high, rolled into the Phoenix area with gusts of wind up to 62 mph on Monday evening.
Haboobs, as the dust-walls are known, only happen in Arizona, the Sahara desert and parts of the Middle East because of dry conditions and large amounts of sand, weather officials say.
The storms are known to halt airline flights, knock out power and turn swimming pools into mud pits.
Monday's haboob was part of a massive monsoon storm that downed trees and power lines, flooded roadways and left nearly 14,000 customers without power.
With a little over a month left before the official end of Arizona's monsoon season, storms like Monday's aren't unusual, but this one was much more widespread than others this summer, according to an official with the National Weather Service in Phoenix.
Arizona dust storms were called haboobs as far back as the October 1972 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The article, An American Haboob, written by Sherwood Idso of Tempe, examined a July 16, 1971, Valley dust storm that had the same characteristics as the ones in the Sudan.
The name comes from the Arabic word habb, meaning, "wind." It has many spellings, including: bub, habub, haboub, hubbob, and hubbub.
