Word: droughts
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...drought is actually three droughts, according to Donald Gilman, a long-range forecaster with the National Weather Service. There have been shortages of moisture in the Southeast for years and in the West for several seasons. The winter and spring rains failed to fill reservoirs around the Tennessee Valley. The winter snowpack in the Rockies has been as much as 60% below normal. "Then the drought began in the Missouri-Mississippi watershed all the way to the Gulf," said Gilman. That was caused by a split in the jet stream, which usually carries storms across California into the Midwest, sucking...
...there is the faint question that comes with the endless wind. How long before this drought tumbles the old records? Then what? Malard shrugs. The last good rain he felt on his face was in August 1987. In March of this year a 10-in. blizzard roared in and hit his area. He waited it out in his house, daring to hope that this was a break in the dryness and that a normal spring of rain would follow. It did not. Instead came the heat and the wind. Malard gets up every morning by 6 and checks...
...corn and soybeans that took root much earlier on slight rains, then simply stopped developing. They hover now between life and death, still handsome to the casual observer. A delegation of Senators and Congressmen whirled across the area in helicopters, minced around in their city shoes looking at the drought wreckage, but sometimes were not impressed. When one of them spied a wheat field he thought looked pretty good, the farmers pulled up the plants to show the withering roots, the stunted buds...
...another age, in a simpler society, a drought of these dimensions was mostly a farm calamity. What could make this drought more menacing than anything yet seen should the rains not come is the interwoven nature of the environment, economy and people. Crop failures, farm bankruptcies, high food costs, transportation disruption, municipal water shortages -- bad as all these are, they are familiar difficulties. Now there is the threat of other, more subtle damage. In California's Silicon Valley, a plan to cut pure reservoir supplies sent a shock through the semiconductor industry. Ionizing mineral-laden well water to the proper...
Lowered lakes and rivers mean more danger of sewage, industrial wastes and agricultural chemicals tainting drinking water and recreation areas. Pollutants are diluted and flushed away by surface water in normal times. The drought has also sent water-hungry users to deep wells, and some of these show disturbing concentrations of nitrates and herbicides...