ST. GEORGE, Utah – For the first time ever this year, farmer Jimmie Hughes saw all 15 ponds he keeps for his livestock dry up.
Now he and his colleagues are forced to haul tanks of water over dusty mountain roads for two hours to water their 300 cows. “It’s just a daily grind, we don’t make any money,” 50-year-old Mr. Hughes said one day late last month, amid another day of unshakable sunshine in a winter that has seen very little rain here in South. America. Utah.
The Southwest is once again locked in drought, leading to farm and farm cutbacks and renewed pressure on urban supplies. Extreme to exceptional droughts affecting between 57% and 90% of the land in Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Arizona, shrinking a snowsuit that supplies 40 million people from Denver to Los Angeles with water, according to the US Drought Monitor. .
Jimmie Hughes, bottom right, farms in Mohave County, Ariz., Where he and his colleagues often drag water over mountain roads to pastures. A storage tank that fills slowly from a natural source is used to supply the livestock with water.
A water truck is being filled in Mohave County, Ariz. The water is taken to other areas where livestock graze and is stored for future use.
The team of government and academic agencies producing the monitor defines drought as a period of unusually dry weather that causes problems such as crop losses and water shortages.
The current drought, which started last year, already appears to be one of the worst on record in the Southwest. Utah and Nevada had their driest years in 126 years of federal records in 2020, while Arizona and Colorado had their second driest and New Mexico the fourth, according to Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. . He said the Southwest has been in drought for much of the past two decades, the latter being caused after one of the driest summers on record.
Dehydrated
The Southwestern US has been hit by a severe and in some places record-breaking drought since last year.
In Southern New Mexico’s Elephant Butte Irrigation District, farmers have already been warned that they will only get 16% of their normal allotment by June.
“It’s ghastly here,” said Gary Esslinger, district treasurer manager in Las Cruces, NM. He said the area’s 6,500 farmers have already taken one-third of their 90,640 irrigated acres from previous drought years and are likely to keep it. this year also offline. State engineer John D’Antonio Jr. from New Mexico said his office is asking other farmers not to plant this year, if they can, as statewide reservoirs contain only 20% of what they normally do.
The drought has also spread to California, where the snow pack was 58% of the average on Monday, according to historical data going back a little less than a century. That increases the likelihood of droughts that could contribute to wildfires and trigger agricultural cuts, state officials say. A torrent of rainfall at the end of the winter rainy season could mitigate the risk of those outcomes, but is not currently predicted.
“We have time, but we have to keep our fingers crossed,” said Mr. Fuchs.
Meteorologists say that a combination of a warming climate and changing atmospheric patterns that divert storms northward are causing the dry spells to become more frequent and pronounced. As a result, the landscape is not given enough time to recover before the next drought sets in, said Mr. Fuchs.
Colorado enjoyed an above-average snow season a year ago, but much of the spring runoff was sucked up by soil that was still dry from previous droughts, he said. At the end of 2020, the state suffered the largest forest fires ever.
The population of St. George, Utah, and its suburbs doubled between 2000 and last year.
Meanwhile, reservoir levels in the southwest are on the decline. The largest of those reservoirs, Lake Mead, is 41% full after years of dwindling flow from the Colorado River. Federal officials warn it is on track to slip below a threshold of 1,075 feet in the next two years, leading to government-mandated water savings for millions of users.
Complicating matters are the explosive population growth in the Southwest. St. George and its suburbs – nestled between red-rock canyons and snow-capped mountains – last year numbered 188,000 people, more than double the population of 91,000 in 2000, according to census estimates.
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“We’ve always been dry,” said insurance businessman Ed Bowler, who guided his pickup truck past rows of new tract homes on a tour one day in late February. “But we didn’t have all of these people.”
The past two summers have been the warmest on record in the Washington County area. St. George went 154 days last year without any measurable precipitation, breaking the previous record of 121 days since 1929.
In the longer term, officials in Southern Utah are looking to water pipes to help meet the area’s needs.
There are no other good options, said Zach Renstrom, general manager of the Washington County Water Conservancy District. ‘Our plan B,’ he said, ‘is that at some point you have to say,’ Stop. You can no longer build houses here. ‘
The Southwest has been affected by drought for much of the past two decades.
Write to Jim Carlton at [email protected]
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