ST. GEORGE, Utah – For the first time ever, farmer Jimmie Hughes has seen all 15 of these ponds he keeps for his livestock at the same time this year.
Now he and his co-workers are being forced to drag tanks of water over dusty mountain roads for two hours to water their 300 cows. “It’s just a daily grind, we do not earn any money,” said the 50-year-old. Hughes said one day late last month, amid another day of unshakable sun in a winter that had very little rain here in the south. Utah.
The Southwest has again been locked up in drought, causing cuts on farms and farms and putting renewed pressure on urban supplies. Extreme to extreme droughts hit between 57% and 90% of the country in Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Arizona and shrink a snowstorm that supplies water to 40 million people from Denver to Los Angeles, according to the U.S. drought monitor. .
The team of government and academic agencies that manufacture the monitor defines a drought as a period of exceptional dry weather that causes problems such as crop losses and water shortages.
The current drought, which started last year, is already one of the worst recorded in the South West. Utah and Nevada experienced their driest years in 126 years of federal records during 2020, while Arizona and Colorado had their second driest and New Mexico the fourth, according to Brian Fuchs, climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska. Lincoln. . He said the southwest had been plunged into drought for the past two decades, and that the latest after one of the driest summers had been put on record.