Dust Devil In Reading

[WhiteFox]

I know this sounds unbelievable, and I have no pictures, but we had a dust devil here in Reading last week.

It was a hot day on Sunday as we all know. The sky was clear and I was working with a friend to fix a fault in the phone line. I was making a cup of tea when he suddenly shouted 'What the **** is that?"

I came running and observed a column of dust reaching about 30 metres into the sky and rotating. The nearby trees were blowing and the wind nearby was fairly strong. Across from my house is a building site. A lot of material is stored there, but there is a large patch of open ground which is mostly dusty soil. We went upstairs and by this time the column was about 100 metres tall; the vortex was strong enough to pick up fence panels and other debris. It lasted a couple of minutes before dissipating. THe dust remained in air, slowly descending along with some pieces of plastic from the building site.

A pretty amazing site and a shame I didn't have the presence of mind to pick up my camera; I'll probably never see anything like it again!