The Burning Platform

Leave it to the mainstream media to try and spin the positives from the worst drought since the 1930s. Food prices for produce and meat are headed much higher. Ethanol prices are soaring and will result in higher fuel prices at the pump. Poor people around the world will starve as they cannot afford to pay the higher prices. This will lead to revolutions and riots.

But at least there aren’t any tornadoes and with no rain there is less toxic runoff into the Gulf of Mexico. We got that going for us. See. It ain’t so bad.

Woe and opportunity: Tales from historic drought

(AP)  The United States is in the midst of the worst drought in decades, and the dry  weather and soaring temperatures are taking a toll on people living  and working in Ohio west to California and Texas north to the Dakotas. Farmers  have watched their corn wither and their cattle go hungry. Homeowners have seen  their lawns turn brown and gardens wilt. Communities  in the Midwest that rarely experience water shortages have enacted restrictions,  and businesses are looking for ways to stay afloat as sales fall off. Here are a  few of their stories:

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WATER  FOR QUARTERS

The  creeks and ponds that Cimeron Frost’s 300 cows and calves drink from in central  Illinois are almost dry.

So  each day, he takes rolls of quarters to what amounts to water vending machines  in nearby towns. He drops in the coins, collects the water in metal and plastic  tanks and tows it on trailers to his pastures around the town of Tallula. He  hauls 4,000 gallons a day in four separate trips, dumping or piping the water  into big, galvanized-steel troughs for his herd to drink.

Even  at 40 to 50 gallons per quarter, it adds up.

“It  takes a little over two rolls of quarters a day, plus probably $40 in gasoline a  day, to water all our cows in all our locations,” Frost, 65, said. At $10 a  roll, that’s about 60 bucks a day, or $420 a week, and he’s been hauling every  day since mid-June.

He  estimates he has spent about $2,700 so far. But he worries more about what could  lie ahead.

“If  we don’t have a wet fall and a wet spring, we could be in trouble for another  year,” Frost said.

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BUY  NOW, PLANT LATER

Jeff  Gatewood has never seen a summer this bad in 36 years at Allisonville Nursery in  the Indianapolis suburb of Fishers.

Indianapolis  had its hottest July on record, with temperatures topping 90 degrees on 28 days,  and less than an inch of rain fell in June and July.

“We’ve  now gone where nobody’s gone before. Hot, dry, hot, dry, record-setting all the  time,” Gatewood said.

With  business down 20 percent to 30 percent because of the weather, he quit ordering  new plants in June and cut hours and staff. Then he decided to get creative.

The  nursery held a “heat stroke” sale in late July, offering customers a chance to  buy plants and pick them up later, once cooler temperatures arrive and local  watering bans are lifted. That brought people in and helped business some, he  said.

“We’re  seeing a pent-up demand like a dam wanting to break. I think once we see cooler  temperatures in the lower 80s, get a little rain shower  that’s going to help,”  he said.

The  nursery has clustered plants in shaded areas to protect them. Gatewood said  hydrangeas are especially vulnerable.

“Even  in the shade, when it’s 95 or 100, they hate it,” he said.

–Jeni  O’Malley in Indianapolis

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CREATIVE  FORECASTING

Facing  three minutes to fill on the nightly newscast, a TV station blog to update and a  forecast reading something like “sunny and 102″ for the umpteenth day in a row,  meteorologist Todd Yakoubian doesn’t sweat. He pulls out a meat thermometer.

“I  try to keep it as interesting as possible,” said Yakoubian, a meteorologist with  KATV in Little Rock, Ark. “You can’t do the same thing day in and day out.”

To  illustrate just how hot it has been in Arkansas, and for how long, Yakoubian  recently filled a sink in his home with water from the “cold” tap and measured  it at a not-very-refreshing 84 degrees. He also has fried eggs on a sidewalk and  baked cookies in a car, but admits everybody does that. He’s on a quest to find  other ways to show just how doggone hot the dog days are.

“I  put a wireless thermometer in the attic and hooked up a webcam and streamed it  for “How Hot Is It In Todd’s Attic?”

The  answer: 138.6 degrees.

He  also took temperature readings in his wife’s car to show viewers how dangerous  it was to leave children or animals in vehicles that can reach 130 degrees.

“I  used a meat thermometer because it was the only one I had that would go that  high,” Yakoubian said.

–Kelly  Kissel in Little Rock, Ark.

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A  SILVER LINING

There  may be a silver lining to the drought: The so-called “dead zone” in the Gulf of  Mexico is shrinking and the summer has seen fewer tornadoes.

The  dead zone is an area of low oxygen in the waters that is a long-standing environmental problem, which experts say is  caused by farm pollution running into the Mississippi River and then the Gulf of  Mexico. But with less rain, there is less runoff.

Nancy  Rabalais, a dead zone expert with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium,  found the dead zone was the fourth smallest in 80 years of records. It measured  only 2,889 square miles in July, compared to a five-year average of 5,695 square  miles.

Tornado  Alley also has been quiet this summer. In mid-April, the U.S. looked like it was  on pace to set a record with the number of tornadoes this year. Then the storms  stopped coming.

In  June, there were about 100 tornadoes, the second fewest in more than 60 years of  recordkeeping. Then in July it got even slower, with a preliminary count of 24.  Before this year, the fewest tornadoes the U.S. had in July was 73.

The  heat wave and drought are the primary reason for fewer twisters, said Harold  Brooks, a research meteorologist at the National Severe Storm Laboratory in  Norman, Okla.

In  a drought, there are fewer thunderstorms from which tornadoes can form. But  there’s also less wind shear, which storms need to get rotation for tornadoes,  said Jeff Masters, meteorology director at Weather Underground.

But  exchanging tornadoes for drought and extreme heat is not a good trade. Tornadoes  typically kill one or two people each July, but the heat waves are killing  dozens.

“I  think heat waves are the most dangerous weather phenomena out there,” Masters  said.

–Seth  Borenstein in Washington, D.C.

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WEEPING  WILLOWS

The  limbs of the weeping willows gracing banks of a lake at the Chicago Botanic  Gardens drooped more than usual, and the leaves  normally plush and green   wilted and began to fall after several weeks of unusual heat.

Weeping  willows are water-loving trees, said Tim Johnson, horticulture director for the  botanic gardens: “When things dried down, they responded. The leaves yellowed up  and some dropped.”

Many  of the gardens’ 2.5 million plants have required extra watering during the  summer’s triple-digit heat, but the willows were a special case.  Groundskeepers  have been excessively watering the willows about once a week for about a month,  drawing water from several lakes on the property to deluge the roots for about  30 minutes.

One  tree that was in particularly bad shape required 850 gallons of water, an amount  that usually hydrates several miles on the 385-acre reserve, during one watering  alone.

Still,  the foliage wilts.

“The  damage has been done,” Johnson said.

–Michelle  Nealy in Chicago

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RESOURCE  RATIONING

Randy  Pettinghill buys water from the city of Morrilton for his farm in the Arkansas  River Valley, but this year, the city put a cap on what he could have. It turns  on the spigot every third night from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., and Pettinghill collects  as much as he can in lagoons on his property in Arkansas’ Conway County.

He  tries to ration the water, but with the temperature regularly over 100 degrees,  he’s losing a lot to evaporation.

He  has wells on his property too. He spent $25,000 to have the second one drilled  in July because the first was producing half its normal amount of water. He  connected the two, and they still aren’t producing enough to keep his corn and  soybeans irrigated. He left about two-fifths of his 1,700 acres unplanted this  year, and he’s been pumping water onto the rest, spending $22,000 a month for  fuel.

“If  I run out of water, they’ll be dead in two weeks,” he said.

–Charles  Bartels in Little Rock, Ark.

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CASHING  IN

For  some, the drought will likely be a money-maker  especially those who fall  outside the dry-weather zone.

One  of those farmers is Harlan Anderson.  The rainfall on his 800-acre farm near  Cokato in southern Minnesota has been normal, maybe a bit more. That means he’ll  have alfalfa, corn and soybeans to sell when others don’t, and he’ll benefit from rising prices.

But  demonstrating what he described as his Scandinavian sense of reserve, Anderson  said he feels a little guilty when talking about how he expects to profit from  the misfortune of other farmers in the Upper Midwest.

“My  projection is that our gross profits for the year will double,” Anderson said.  “The drought has certainly been good to me. Don’t say that too loud.”

He’s  started getting frequent calls in recent weeks from livestock farmers around the  country. Some usually grow their own feed, while others buy it from farmers like  Anderson. All are starting to worry about their supply.

“Looking  ahead, they’re trying to decide if there’s a sufficient supply of feed, can they  afford it and are they going to keep feeding their dairy cow or their horse  or  are they going to shoot them?” Anderson said.

–Patrick  Condon in Minneapolis

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