The government first shut off the flow of irrigation water to more than 1,000 parched farms in the Klamath Basin in April, reserving the water to protect the habitat of endangered fish.
And of them all, perhaps the most expensive of recent times, already estimated to have cost more than $50 billion, is the drought that had 60percentt of the country in its grip last year and has continued relentlessly into 2013, parching the Southwest, the Midwest, and parts of the West.
After last year's dry winter and a parched, sweltering summer, reservoirs are depleted, streams are low, and snowpack levels stand at 41 percent of their historical average.
As the winter progresses with no break from last year's parched conditions, concern is mounting that California may be headed for a replay of the big drought of the late 1980s through the early 1990s, or even worse, 1977.
About 200,000 acres, kept green through damming and diversion since 1909, are parched.
One year ago the news was aflame with the extreme drought of 2011 that parched all of Texas.
The steady rise of films such as Angry Indian Goddesses (2015) by Pan Nalin, Parched by Leena Yadav (2016), Pink (2016) by Aniruddha Roy Chowdury and Sen's recent Sonata (2017) is palpable.
Parts of central Panama have been reduced to a dustbowl, and thousands of cattle have had to be slaughtered (not wholly a loss: they were already helping to make the dustbowl).In Colombia drought has parched 5,000 square kilometres of pasture and 2,000 of maize, sorghum and soya.
The warm summer helped, parching the rolling landscape and giving central Germany a Tuscan quality.
Photo: More than 500 homes were evacuated outside Anaheim, Calif., yesterday as a fast-moving brush fire scorched 2,000 acres of parched hillside and crept into backyards, fire officials said.
Meteorologists said Wednesday's storm was a good omen for Denver, which was mostly parched last winter, with only about 23 inches of snow in the city from September to May.
