Word: droughts
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...Toowoomba's residents are slowly running out of water, and have been for the past 15 years, along with nearly everyone else in this corner of eastern Australia. The region is undergoing its worst drought in over a century, and dead flower beds and brown football fields are the least of their worries. Toowoomba is the go-to city for a large rural area, including the nearby Darling Downs, fertile farm country until the rain went away and never came back. "We've been in water restriction in Toowoomba since 1992," says Dianne Thorley, the city's mayor of eight...
...have seen firsthand how Mbola's farming households suffer from a recurrent drought--not of water but of nitrogen and other nutrients needed to achieve a decent harvest. Previous harvests have exhausted the soil because Mbola's farmers could not afford chemical or organic fertilizers...
...trial couldn't happen in a place that needs it more. Queensland's government has budgeted 7.6 million Australian dollars ($6.7 million U.S.) in public money into the four-year, multipartner experiment, part of a larger initiative to fight the crushing drought, including a desalination plant and a controversial program to recycle waste into drinking water. "We're in uncharted territory as far as rainfall goes," says Craig Wallace, the state's Natural Resources and Water Minister. Wallace acknowledges that going out on a limb with cloud seeding - which still has its naysayers in the scientific community - may raise some...
...Minh trail to hamper supply movement, until word got out and the U.S. agreed not to play with the weather while making war. In the 1970s, the science of cloud seeding acquired a whiff of the snake oil, as disreputable private companies tried hawking it to desperate, drought-ridden communities. And by the following decade, it had fallen out of favor (its use in Vietnam, which reminded some people of Agent Orange, probably didn't help much), and funding fell off with...
...communities have suffered the most," says Toowoomba Mayor Thorley. "When things get really bad, people get depressed and anxious about what's happening. It makes it difficult for families." In the 1990s, an outreach group called the Bush Connection was established to ease the the social impact of the drought: alcoholism, domestic violence and suicide...