Hundreds of volunteers took part to make sure the bags hold air, to see how they handle if the wind kicks up and it's a testing ground for the handlers themselves as managing these things does take some technique.
Thankfully, so far, nothing indicates that this kind of catastrophe is going to happen again any time soon, but don't sigh with relief and kick your feet up just yet.
But what you might not notice is things like the tire tracks from the car that they're driving have been removed or the dust being kicked up from the tires.
When we tap your, let's say your patellar tendon that causes a stretch in a muscle spindle, this sends a signal back to the sensory neuron, which activates a motor neuron in the spinal cord to cause your knee to kick up.
Engineers did just that, triggering an intense snowy slide that kicked up a powdery plume in the Cottonwoods Canyon area, all to try and prevent damage should just such a thing happen again.
Now with the lake bed exposed, those chemicals and weapons were just sitting out in the open and the winds have begun kicking all of this up into huge toxic dust storms that ravage across the landscape.
On a day that broke as blue and beautiful as the morning a year ago when the planes toppled the towers, a brisk northwest wind kicked up the dust of Ground Zero.
With an upcountry fire, not fully contained Maui's Fire Department stretched painfully thin and winds kicking up once again, some residents around Kula are using sprinklers and hope to protect their homes.
Researchers suspect that the impact caused the extinction by kicking up a cloud of dust and tiny droplets called aerosols that plunged the planet into something like a nuclear winter.