But if you're not living in a community dependent on bottled water rations, farming land that's projected to lose $800 million in crop revenue or watching raging wildfires ravage your drought-parched town, the historic California drought may still feel like little more than a headline.
Because of a statewide drought, two towns have amended their water restrictions and increased penalties.
The six-minute film, "Dried Up," the story of a man's quest to bring hope and life to a drought-ridden town, won the silver medal in animation at the 37th Student Academy Awards in 2010, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Reeling from the drought, the towns were overrun in 2004 and 2005 by insurgents who used them as bases for attacks on Mosul, Tal Afar and other cities in the region.
The Rainmaker N. Richard Nash's classic romance set in a drought-stricken town during the Depression.
In 2015, she won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for her narrative portraits of farmers, fieldworkers and other Californians in drought-stricken towns in the Central Valley.
Residents blame a lack of jobs — not the drought — for the town's decline.
Parched and crackling after a two-year drought, the Australian town of Kiewarra is the highly combustible setting for Jane Harper's first novel The Dry (Little, Brown, £12.99).
Because of an editing error, a news analysis article last Sunday about the longstanding Texas drought misstated the town where Cargill, the giant food producer, idled a beef-processing plant because of drought conditions.
Today Lowy's obsession helped by the family's US$3.8 billion fortune has turned the drought-ridden New South Wales town of Temora, population 4,000, into a mecca for vintage-warplane enthusiasts.
