Word: droughts
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...while the West has bloomed on the river's bounty, exploding populations and a prolonged drought have had an ominous effect on the Colorado itself. The river that used to surge into the Gulf of California, depositing ruddy-colored silt that fanned out into a broad delta of new land at its mouth, hardly ever makes it to the sea anymore. The once mighty Colorado fizzles into a trickle, its last traces evaporating in the heat of the Mexican desert...
...Colorado is not in good shape," says Norris Hundley Jr., a historian at UCLA. "It essentially exists in a straitjacket." Last April the Arizona stretch of the Colorado was named "the most endangered river of 1991" by American Rivers, a Washington-based conservation group. A prolonged drought in the U.S. Southwest, now in its fifth year, has dealt the Colorado a double whammy. Less snow to melt at its sources means less water coursing downriver; reduced rainfall elsewhere means even greater demands on the diminished flow...
...million acre-feet to Mexico. All fine and dandy, except for one thing: the Colorado's output was grossly overestimated. Instead of the 16.9 million acre-feet estimated to be there for the dividing, the river has been flowing at a rate of only 14.9 million; during the present drought, that figure has dropped to about 9 million acre- feet a year...
Floyd Lester Patterson III, a rancher in Monterey County, Calif., was charged in April with 27 misdemeanors involving illegal possession and transportation of animals and parts of animals on the endangered-species list. When drought forced him to sell off most of his cattle, Patterson began conducting legal hunts of boar and other game. Then he allegedly obtained nine large cats that are on the endangered-species list, including a spotted leopard and a Bengal tiger. Some of them were probably purchased from zoos. According to the charges, hunters paid around $3,500 each to blast away at the animals...
...This week in Santa Barbara, citizens will vote on a special bond issue to link the city to the state water system. The choice is difficult because while state-supplied water would help relieve severe drought conditions, it might also encourage a burst of unwanted new development that many residents fear could turn the exclusive coastal enclave into a Los Angeles suburb...