Word: toowoomba
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...good people of Toowoomba, Australia, a town of about 90,000 that sits atop the Great Dividing Range in southeast Queensland, have a branding problem on their hands. Residents of the nation's "Garden City" have not been able to use their sprinklers for nearly three years. Handheld hoses got the kibosh two years ago, and in 2006, watering the lawn by bucket was also banned...
...Toowoomba's residents are slowly running out of water, and have been for the last 15 years, along with nearly everyone else in this corner of eastern Australia. It's the region's worst and longest-lasting drought in over a century, and dead flower beds and brown football fields are the least of their worries. Toowoomba was the go-to city for a large rural area, including nearby Darling Downs, a fertile farmland, 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...
...Toowoomba and its environs might be in luck. This week, scientists in the area got one step closer to launching what could be the world's most advanced experiment in rainmaking - or, as it's known in weather circles, cloud seeding. It's the practice of injecting clouds with a foreign substance, usually silver iodide, salt or dry ice, to make the the cloud's water or ice particles bigger and yield more rain. The technique has been used in different parts of the world for more than 60 years, with varying success. But the improvement of weather technology...
...farmers around Toowoomba already know what nature is producing in their specific region: zilch. More specifically, zilch, with no end in sight - and it has pushed many local farmers past the point of coping. "The rural 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...
...more frequent droughts, overpopulation and intensified irrigation are pressing water engineers to devise new approaches. And some of them will take some getting used to. Despite a five-year drought widely considered the worst in Australia's recorded history, the residents of Toowoomba in Queensland last year resoundingly rejected an offer from the national government to fund a program to recycle purified sewage water back into the system. Scientific evidence and taste tests couldn't prevail against the yuck factor...