DROUGHT

DROUGHT. Drought reports in Iowa have generally begun in late July or August. On August 31, 2020 roughly 96% of Iowa was considered at least abnormally dry as drought conditions worsened across the state. That is an 8% increase since the last week. 61% of Iowa in June was in at least moderate drought, with 29% in severe drought and roughly 7% in extreme drought. These could be the driest conditions recorded since the drought of 2012, according to a Siouxland Proud article. (1)

Every county in Iowa was experiencing drought conditions, but the western part of the state had been hit the hardest. 21% of Iowa corn was in “poor or very poor” condition according to the USDA. There were a few chances of rain across the state in the 10 day forecast, but drought conditions were likely to continue. (2)

Conditions changed in 2021. As of June 15, 2021 Dubuque had received 8.78 inches of rain since the beginning of the year according to the National Weather Service. That was about 7 inches below normal. The area had gone through its traditionally higher moisture period without precipitation. Among the results of the drought was a large sandbar which appeared in the Peosta Channel. (3) Former river bottom now exposed extended for as much as ten feet out from the river wall.

On Thursday. June 24, 2021 the level of the MISSISSIPPI RIVER at Dubuque was 7.55 feet according to the National Weather Service. The river had not been this low in June since the drought of 1988. Predictions were made that the river could drop to 7.4 feet by July 1st. Some boats at the DUBUQUE MARINA INC. were unable to leave the dock. Some customers of Midtown Marina in East Dubuque were forced to remove their boats from the receding water to avoid damage and store them on trailers. One docking facility not faced with low water was the PORT OF DUBUQUE MARINA which is unusually deep. This facility was welcoming larger boats unable to use their traditional facilities. One new visitor to the Port of Dubuque to refuel was the 135-passenger yacht American Lady which usually docked at the Dubuque Yacht Basin. (4)

Historically, Iowa did not exist as a state during some of the droughts that affected the United States. With the passage of time and the interdependence of Iowa with the rest of the nation, droughts occurred in other area of the country, but their effect was felt on Iowans who depended on commerce.

Defined by the National Weather Service, droughts were " shortages of water over an extended period of time." They were a normal and natural part of Earth's weather cycle. Severe droughts are often far more widespread, more devastating, more expensive, and harder to manage than violent natural disasters. Droughts can create or encourage a range of secondary environmental catastrophes like fires, crop failures, mudslides, sinkholes, destroyed roadways, massive fish kills, locust swarms, and severe floods.

Throughout U.S. history, droughts have turned farmland to dust, created panic, killed millions of animals, and forced widespread human migration, financial depression, and starvation. The worst droughts also resulted in major reforms. In California, droughts led to creation of the Central Valley Project, State Water Project, urban conservation movement, and the Drought Emergency Water Bank.

Direct and indirect costs of drought total more than $9 billion a year in the United States alone. Although global warming is often portrayed in the media as a debate, there is direct evidence linking climate change to increased instances of severe drought beyond the dry spells that are a natural part of the planet's cycles. Warming temperatures over the past century have directly contributed to major droughts across the country, particularly in the American West. It was only in 2019 that California finally got relief from a catastrophic dry spell that defined the state's ecology throughout much of the past decade.

According to a report from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the year 900 launched the start of a dry spell that scientists refer to as the "Megadrought." The event, which struck the Sierra Nevada and northwestern Great Basin, lasted centuries until tapering off around 1300. A variety of data back up this claim including dendrochronology (tree-ring studies) (5)

Massive earthen mounds like those found in Cahokia, Illinois still stand where the city-states of the Mississippian American Indian culture once thrived in the Mississippi River Valley 1,000 years ago. Unfortunately for the corn-based society, according to National Public Radio, a "profound drought" set in around 1350. This resulted in the Little Ice Age in Europe and began an intense dry spell causing dry Arctic air pouring in through the Gulf of Mexico. The catastrophic drought lasted as long as 500 years, much longer than the culture whose crucial corn crops were wiped out by the changing climate.

Before the 1849 Gold Rush brought masses of pioneers pouring into California, early settlers struggled with extreme environmental conditions. California's Sonoma County, one of the most fertile and productive agricultural landscapes in the world, was struck in 1841 by a severe drought leaving the area "unsuitable for agriculture," according to the California Climate and Action Network. The entire Sacramento Valley was little more than "a barren wasteland."

By the middle of the 19th century, huge numbers of people, horses, and farm animals had already flooded into the Great Plains—enough to affect the land and its ability to tolerate drought. According to the Earth Institute at Columbia University, drought struck the area in the mid-1850s. The "CIVIL WAR" drought wiped out entire herds of bison—which once numbered in the millions—that were already being hunted to near extinction by pioneers and settlers.

In one of the most dramatic environmental changes in American history, California's Central Valley was flooded so severely between 1861 and 1862 that it turned into a 300-mile long, 20-mile wide "inland sea," according to Scientific American. The floods submerged Sacramento under 10 feet of water, killing thousands of people and hundreds of thousands of cattle. Just two years later in 1864, however, the region was caught in a drought so severe that a lack of water was a great danger to people and animals.

In 1874, a relatively mild drought led to a catastrophe across much of the American Plains and the West. When a dry spell set in at the end of 1873, most of the Colorado Territory, Montana Territory, Wyoming Territory, Dakota Territory, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Texas, and present-day Oklahoma were filled with Rocky Mountain locusts so thick that they blocked out the sun for up to six hours at a time. Locusts thrive in drought conditions. When they descended, the insects devoured every crop in sight, causing widespread starvation and terror, and forced thousands of settlers to pack up, reverse course, and head back East. Kansas alone lost one-third of its population.

The 1890s drought, which affected the Plains and much of the West, actually started in the late 1880s at the end of a severe winter that had already killed scores of cattle. The catastrophe, however, led to reform. The drought ended the theory that hardy, determined settlers alone were enough to change wilderness into farmland. The environmental and social disaster led to the federalization of American settlement in the West and the federalization of water management and irrigation. (6)

The year 1928 was the beginning of one of several distinct and significant 20th-century California droughts. According to the California Water Science Center, the seven-year California drought predated most of the state's major water projects, like the State Water Project and the Federal Central Valley Project. The drought was so severe that it forced officials to begin planning reservoir operations and to establish shortage criteria for water supply contracts in the state.

The DUST STORM (1934) is one of the most famous environmental catastrophes in U.S. history. Although irresponsible farming practices and land mismanagement contributed to the disaster, the Dust Bowl—which occurred with the GREAT DEPRESSION—was essentially the result of drought. According to the National Drought Mitigation Center, the calamity turned millions of tons of topsoil into dust that went airborne in massive storms. This was caused by four distinct droughts that ravaged the South Central portion of the United States in the 1930s.

The Texas Drought, known as "the Great Dry Up" devastated most of the Lone Star State for seven brutal years. Crops withered, cattle died, farms turned to dust, and farmers burned the thorns off of cacti to feed their herds. In the end, 236 of Texas's 254 counties were declared disaster areas.

In 1965, the Northeast suffered the worst year of a nearly decade-long drought that ruined New England farms, forced severe water rationing measures, and sent the region into a panic about drinking water shortages. What started as a dry spell in western Massachusetts transformed into a regional disaster that destroyed golf courses, turned deep ponds to mud, triggered widespread fires, and killed millions of herring that could no longer swim from the ocean to fresh water to spawn.

California's water agencies were not prepared for the 1976–77 drought. The event dispelled the belief that the state's many impressive water projects were enough to insulate residents from the threat of water shortages. By the time relief came from the sky one year later, many of California's reservoirs had been dangerously depleted.

In 1987, California once again found itself at the beginning of a significant and dangerous shortage of water. According to the California Water Science Center, most of the state's major reservoirs were completed by then, but even that effort proved insufficient. By 1991, the drought forced the state to begin a drought water bank to make water available for sale to the most desperate municipalities.

In 1988, a Pacific weather pattern known as La Niña caused changes in the atmosphere and temperature which resulted in widespread reduction of precipitation across the Central United States. One of the costliest natural disasters in American history and the worst drought on record since the Dust Bowl, it destroyed at least half of the crops on the Great Plains.

Florida entered the 21st century in one of the worst droughts in the state's recorded history. Freshwater withdrawals, record-low stream flows, hundreds of sinkholes, and persistent wildfires were particularly bad in the southwest, northeast, and northwest regions of the state. (7)

In March 2019, authorities officially declared the end to more than seven years of severe drought in California. It was a long time coming. For 376 consecutive weeks, Californians suffered a grinding dry spell characterized by dangerously low water reserves, raging fires, the death of 102 million trees on 7 million acres, snowless mountain ranges, and millions of dollars of damage to highways. When the rains finally came, they resulted in a stunning blossom of wildflowers—and raging mudslides.

According to a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a full 33% of the contiguous United States spent 2012 in the grip of a drought labeled "severe" and "extreme" on NOAA's most serious official classifications on the drought scale. NOAA outlined causes ranging from decreased precipitation to changes in atmospheric pressure, the inevitable result of a warming planet.

In 2016, New York suffered one of the worst droughts in the state's history which went largely unnoticed compared with the attention given to the drought in California. Rainfall was down by 25% across much of the state causing widespread crop failure and devastation to waterways and marine life.

In 2016, parts of Alabama received no rainfall at all for six weeks. Farmers sold selling cattle they could no longer feed, and topsoil turned to powder. It was a drought that covered much of the Southeast and then spread as far west as Texas and as far north as Kentucky. By the end of the year, 40% of the Southeast was suffered moderate to exceptional drought conditions, and when the rains finally came, they fell on parched land that could not absorb the water, resulting in widespread flooding.

In October, 2016 with significant droughts over nearly 45% of the contiguous United States, winter droughts became a concern. The hopes in California, where a drought was in its sixth year, hopes faded that a strong El Niña would bring more drought relief. The hoped for above-average wet season did not occur. (8)

Drought and heat work in a vicious cycle. In dry conditions, less of the sun's energy goes into evaporating soil moisture because the ground is not wet. More of the sun's energy is then left to heat the air and the drought worsens. (9)

The effects of climate change on the weather of the U.S. became undeniable for millions of people and state and federal policymakers in 2020. California wildfires raged across the state because the cycle between drought and rainfall, caused by climate change increased the risks of wildfire. Other states, meanwhile, broke records for the hottest days on record, and close to half of the U.S. ended 2020 at some level of drought. (10)

In March, 2021 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projected for the first time in three years no major spring flooding. Of the 82 million people to be affected by flooding, damage would be minor. These were the conditions seen in Dubuque as the rise in the Mississippi River caused no major problems. (11)

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Source:

1. Well, Nicole, "Drought Conditions Worsen in Iowa After Another Dry Week," "Iowa Environmental Focus," August 31, 2020, Online: https://iowaenvironmentalfocus.org/tag/drought/

2. Ibid.

3. Hogstrom, Erik, "Drought Conditions 'Very Concerning,'" Telegraph Herald, June 15, 2021, p. 1

4. Kelsey, Elizabeth, "Low River Levels Keeping Local Boaters Landlocked," Telegraph Herald, June 25, 2021, p. 1

5. Lisa, Andrew, "History of Droughts in the United States," Stacker, March 5, 2021, Online: https://stacker.com/stories/2789/history-droughts-us

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. "Winter Drought Forecast Across U.S." (Associated Press), Telegraph Herald, October 24, 2016, p. 20

9. Ibid.

10. Borenstein, Seth, (Associated Press) "Spring Forecast: Nasty Drought Conditions Worsen for Much of US," Telegraph Herald, March 19, 2021, p. 28