Another Dust Bowl may be in the making

By Jeff Donn

Associated Press

Drought has engulfed nearly a third of the United States, threatening to confront some places this summer with what experts say could be their worst water shortages in years.

"This is a sleeping giant," said climatologist Mark Svoboda at the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Neb. "The impact is still to come."

In typically dry Southern California, the recent feeble wet season is apt to harden into full-blown drought, say government and private forecasters. Bernie Rayno, a forecaster at the private AccuWeather service in State College, Pa., is more worried about that region than the East.

"They’re missing their window of opportunity," he said. "Once you get past that, you’re not going to get rain there."

In the last six months, Los Angeles has seen about a third of its usual 11 inches of precipitation.

Already, New York and Baltimore are pumping water from temporary storage reservoirs normally avoided for their less desirable color or taste. Thousands of shallow wells in New Hampshire and Georgia have run dry. In Kansas, some ranchers are hauling in water or selling off cattle.

Yet, a much stiffer test will come this summer when farmers water crops, homeowners douse lawns and gardens, and high temperatures evaporate water faster. Without a rainy spring, some places in the East may face a summer of water problems that could rival the record droughts of the 1960s, according to Harry Lins, a drought specialist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Overall, drought has spread to about 30 percent of the country, according to forecaster Richard Tinker at the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center. That is an unusually broad reach, but still far short of the 1930s Dust Bowl. In those years, up to 70 percent of the country was parched and dust clouds sometimes blotted out the sun for days at a time.

Drought conditions now run in two vast Western and Eastern strips, each hundreds of miles across, from Montana to Texas and Maine to Georgia, according to a federal-academic partnership that puts together the U.S. Drought Monitor map.

Forecasters say it’s especially difficult to make long-range forecasts for the Northeast. But they are hopeful that spring rains will relieve some of that region’s drought, which took hold last fall. However, drought has lingered in Texas and Georgia for six years.

Several factors have combined to parch so much territory, drought experts say. La Nina, a cooling of Pacific Ocean surface waters, is blamed for the recent warm, dry winters in the Southeast and warm, dry summers in the northern Rocky Mountain states.

A northern track taken by the high-altitude jet stream has steered this winter’s storms toward the Pacific Northwest and Midwest. Persistent high pressure in the East has locked out storms.

Finally, one of the warmest winters on record in some places on the East Coast is letting water soak into soft ground instead of running off to replenish surface supplies.

Communities along the coast have issued drought watches and warnings. Connecticut environmental officials said Wednesday they were suspending the annual opening of dams for the first time since 1981. The water release is meant to scour riverbeds to improve fish habitats.

New York City’s reservoirs have sunk to 48 percent of capacity, with about half of the normal 23 inches of precipitation over the past six months. Water managers have doubled the share used from the New Croton Reservoir —an older system — to 20 percent, though people sometimes complain of its darker color and unpleasant smell. City officials say mandatory reductions in water use could be imposed within a month.

Around Baltimore, reservoirs are lower than ever before for this time of year. The Prettyboy, one of three city reservoirs, has dropped to one-third of capacity.

"Prettyboy is starting to look like the Grand Canyon out there, with all the cracks in the mud," said Kurt Kocher, a spokesman for the city Department of Public Works.