Word: droughts
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...also hit hard at the Continent's power systems. With many rivers flowing at only a third of their normal volume and hydroelectric output cut, French utilities have had to burn some 2 million extra tons of oil to meet customer demands for power. As the drought continued in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, rains began to fall in Western Europe-too little and too late to be of much help...
AFRICA has been struck by localized droughts in Tanzania, Kenya and in the northern parts of heavily populated Nigeria and Ghana. Near normal rains in the Sahel-the southern edge of the Sahara, where as many as half a million died in the great 1972-74 drought-have brought adequate harvests, but the moisture may prove to be a mixed blessing. The rainfall spawned an almost biblical plague of rats, locusts and caterpillars in Mali, Senegal, Mauritania and Upper Volta. Millions of gerbils, which U.S. children often keep as pets, are loose on the land in Niger, devouring everything...
AUSTRALIA has been hit by drought in parts of its southern regions that have had no more than 10% of their normal rainfall this year. Only about half of a planned 24 million acres has been planted with wheat; fodder for cattle is so scarce that farmers are slaughtering livestock they can no longer feed. In Victoria, the air echoes with the sound of gunshots as ranchers, who have already shot about 27,000 head of cattle, rid themselves of stock. In South Australia, stockmen are demanding compensation for an estimated 100,000 head of cattle and 2 million sheep...
...UNITED STATES has also been hit by drought. In California, forests and canyons are tinder dry, and the fire danger is high. Reservoirs in Colorado are down. Drought-caused crop losses in Wisconsin are estimated at $400 million. Despite drought in some areas, however, American growers are expected to harvest more than 2 billion bu. of wheat...
...create the "Azores bridge." This in turn formed what weather experts called the "omega block," a high-pressure barricade that prevented the normal clockwise movement of damp air from the Atlantic to Europe, a flow that usually assumes a vast omega (Ω) shape. Australian meteorologists have attributed the drought to the unexplained absence of the rain-bearing westerly winds that usually sweep across the lower part of the continent at this time of year. The dry spells suffered by the U.S. plains states are blamed on blocking by a high pressure center over the upper Midwest...