“But you can take ‘virtual’ water and export it alfalfa, cotton, electricity or anything created in part from the use of water.” “You can’t take water and export it out of the state, there’s laws about that,” said Arizona geohydrologist Marvin Glotfelty, a well-drilling expert. Much of the frustration is pointed at the area’s huge, foreign-owned farms growing thirsty crops like alfalfa, which ultimately get shipped to feed cattle and other livestock overseas. Now frustration is growing in Arizona’s La Paz County, as shallower wells run dry amid the Southwest’s worst drought in 1,200 years. Office manager Brianna Davis, left, chats with manager Gary Saiter, right, at Wenden Domestic Water Improvement District. Residents and farms pull water from the same underground pools, and as the water table declines, the thing determining how long a well lasts is how deeply it was drilled. Groundwater is the lifeblood of the rural Southwest, but just as the Colorado River Basin is in crisis, aquifers are rapidly depleting from decades of overuse, worsening drought and rampant agricultural growth. The farm was “pumping and it was sucking the water through the aquifer.” “The well guys and I have never seen anything like this before,” Saiter told CNN. Gary Saiter, a longtime resident and head of the Wenden Water Improvement District, said the water was moving because it was being pumped rapidly out of the ground by a neighboring well belonging to Al Dahra, a United Arab Emirates-based company farming alfalfa in the Southwest.Īl Dahra did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.
See when to water your vegetable garden to avoid waste.Īlso, learn about using a rain barrel to capture the water.Workers with the water district in Wenden, Arizona, saw something remarkable last year as they slowly lowered a camera into the drought-stricken town’s well: The water was moving.īut the aquifer which sits below the small desert town in the southwestern part of the state is not a river it’s a massive, underground reservoir which stores water built up over thousands of years. As a gardener, you may need some advice on dealing with your garden in a localized drought. What can I do with my garden in drought conditions?Ī. The prolonged period of weird weather also produced another term, snuster, which is a combination of snow and dust driven by strong, cold winds. One of the worst dust storms, on April 14, 1933, in Pampa, Texas, caused Woody Guthrie to pen the song “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You.” The term dust bowl was coined by Associated Press reporter Robert Geiger, writing from Guymon, Oklahoma. The dust storms were followed by plagues of spiders, grasshoppers, and jackrabbits. It affected 97 million acres of land, including the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles and parts of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Lives were broken or reshaped as farmers were ruined, forced to move, or forced to give up farming altogether. It was the stuff of which movies were made. Years of unwise tillage, followed by strong winds and drought, blew away miles of fertile topsoil from the country’s central plains between 1930 and 1935. The most well-known drought in the United States came to be known as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. What’s the worst drought we’ve had in the United States?Ī. El Niño and its accompanying disruption of normal weather patterns also can play a role. On the West Coast, where the rainy season is usually the winter months, a high-pressure system stuck in the north brings a dry season. For the eastern and central United States, drought occurs when a ridge in the jet stream stalls over the middle of the country. A number of different weather patterns can lead to a prolonged period of dry weather, but all of them are related to stationary systems that prevent the usual ebb and flow of weather and block the normal pattern of rainfall in a particular region. Drought in other parts of the world frequently leads to famine, as crops are damaged and food supplies suffer. This area is normally fertile farmland and ranch land, but the region is visited regularly by drought.
This includes parts of ten states-Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. The Great Plains is the area of our country most at risk for droughts. Where do droughts occur in the United States?Ī.
0 kommentar(er)
