FORT WORTH, Texas — “The Dust Bowl,” filmmaker Ken Burns’ two-night, four-hour documentary, airing at 8 p.m. Sunday and Monday on Channel 13, is provocative and enlightening. It will set the record straight once and for all about the devastating decade-long drought of the 1930s.

Burns and his team conducted interviews with dozens of people, now in their 80s and 90s, who lived to tell about enduring the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history.

Their suffering was magnified, because it coincided with the economic blow of the Great Depression.

That said, viewers won’t fully appreciate the enormity of the Dust Bowl until footage taken by an amateur filmmaker of the day shows a monster dust storm, hundreds of feet high, as it approaches and envelops a small town, snuffing out the sun at noon.

“This was a 10-year apocalypse filled with hundreds of storms, some of which moved more dirt in one day than it took the entire excavation of the Panama Canal to move,” Burns says. “For the people who lived through it, it was suffering overlaid on suffering.”