Thursday Thinking - Drought of 2012

A little over a week ago I posted something about having some time to read on a rainy Tuesday. I got more responses about rain than I did about the book I mentioned. One person in the Omaha area wrote, "Send some of that rain down here. Our crops are dying in the fields."

Monday of this week, I drove a moving truck from the Twin Cities to Nashville. That means I got a good close look at Illinois from top to bottom. I never enjoy that stretch of road and frequently wonder how much nicer my world would be if there wasn't any Illinois. Why can't western Tennessee just be tucked up nicely to the bottom of Wisconsin? Well, on Monday, I'm sad to say, it looked as though Illinois might, in fact, just dry up and blow away.

I grew up in Nebraska, so I'm no stranger to wide open flat lands, desert grasses, and brownish summers on the plains. What I saw in Illinois, however, was truly astounding. I think it's the most severe drought situation I've ever seen. The fields and roadsides and medians were absolutely scorched! It looked like everything had burned up, and then, just to make things worse, as if someone had spray painted all the dead plants a rusty brown. Even the weeds were parched. Trees were barely hanging in there.

I flew home from Nashville late yesterday afternoon and got a bird's-eye view of the charred midwest. Painful to see. When I returned to the lush landscape of Minnesota and Wisconsin late in the evening, I could see from my window seat that thunderstorms were rolling just south of the Cities.

I'm thankful for the good rain we've had this very hot summer. I'm thankful for the green grass in my yard and the beautiful crop in my garden. But today, I'm thinking of how miserable the poor people of the midwest are as they face the depressing reality of the worse drought since the dust-bowl days. Let's all send up some prayers for them.

From Associated Press

10:49 a.m. CDT, July 26, 2012

A new report shows the drought in the nation's midsection is rapidly intensifying and shows no signs of abating.

Illinois is one of the hardest hit states. It saw its percentage of land in extreme or exceptional drought balloon from 8 percent last week to roughly 71 percent this week, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor report released Thursday.

The report shows the range of the drought in the continental U.S. has increased only slightly in the past week.

But the severity is worsening. The report shows that the amount of U.S. land classified in extreme or exceptional drought jumped to more than 20 percent, up 7 percent from last week.

More than 63 percent of the continental U.S. is in some stage of drought, a portion unseen since the Drought Monitor started 1999.