Drought Continuing to Cause Major Disruptions on Mississippi River

The ongoing drought, which is one of the most severe in the last 100 years, is causing significant problems up and down the Mississippi River. The river's watershed is heavily affected by the drought, which has caused water levels to fall to close to historic lows. That means that boat traffic has slowed down, costs have gone up, and perhaps most dangerously, the salty waters from the Gulf of Mexico are pushing up the river towards New Orleans.

The Army Corps of Engineers is doing what it can to stave off a complete shutdown of river traffic and protecting the New Orleans water supply. They're busy dredging stretches of the river to keep it passable, and they're building a sill below New Orleans to try and keep the salt water from flowing up the river. Normally, the Mississippi's water flows are sufficient to keep the heavier salt water from coming upstream, but the drought conditions have lowered the flow rates.

The Army Corps of Engineers has more than a dozen dredging vessels working the Mississippi this summer. Despite being fed by water flowing in from more than 40 percent of the United States, the river is feeling the ruinous drought affecting so much of the Midwest. Some stretches are nearing the record low-water levels experienced in 1988, when river traffic was suspended in several spots.

That is unlikely this year, because of careful engineering work to keep the largest inland marine system in the world passable. But tow operators are dealing with the shallower channel by hauling fewer barges, loading them lighter and running them more slowly, raising their costs. Since May, about 60 vessels have run aground in the lower Mississippi.

The low water is not just affecting the 500 million tons of cargo like coal, grain and fertilizer that move up and down the river each year. The owners of the American Queen, a paddle-wheel steamboat that takes passengers on tours along the inland waterways, decided not to send the boat below Memphis on a trip to Vicksburg, Miss., this month. The water was deep enough, said Tim Rubacky, a company spokesman, but after conferring with the corps and the Coast Guard, the company decided that the likelihood of a barge accident and ensuing traffic closures would be too great.

“It’s kind of like a truckful of watermelons spilling over on the expressway,” Mr. Rubacky said. “Everything’s going to come to a halt.” The boat tied up at Memphis and sent the passengers on to Vicksburg by bus, he said.

The volume of water coming down the river is so much lower than normal this summer that a wedge of salt water is creeping up the Mississippi toward New Orleans, imperiling local water supplies drawn from the river. The corps is building a sill — basically, a dam of sediment — in the river below New Orleans low enough to block the flow of salt water while letting boats pass.

When the Mississippi is low, the flow slows and sediment settles, causing the river to silt up and obstructions to form, said James T. Pogue, a spokesman for the corps in Memphis. Since 1988, when record low water on the Mississippi caused navigation to shut down, the corps has engineered ways “to help the river keep itself open,” he said, building new features like dikes that stick out into the river and “sort of act like nozzles to speed up the flow of the river” to scour the bed.

Such river training structures help to reduce the amount of dredging necessary by making the river do much of the work. The result, he said, is that even if water reaches the levels that it did before, “we’ll still be in better shape than we were in ’88.”

The river’s problems are the main topic aboard the Motor Vessel Mississippi, a giant towboat fitted by the corps with meeting rooms and used during its annual low-water inspection trip, which included a public hearing in Alton, Ill., on Friday. Some of the speakers complained about the corps’ management of the river during last year’s floods, when water at Vicksburg was nearly 59 feet higher than it has been during this year’s drought. That is the nature of the river — an engineered system, managed but hardly controlled.

Drought Continues Punishing Most of US

Drought across US pushing into the extreme and exceptional. It's getting worse across vast portions of the country, and it's a situation that hasn't been seen in decades.

Grain/corn prices are rising, the Mississippi River is approaching low levels that is already affecting traffic on the river (a major transit corridor for grain, produce, and goods), and there's no sign of a letup.

Oh, and the frackers need water for their natural gas/oil production. It's stressing aquifers and water supplies across the country. Without water, agricultural production will slow, and that will in turn have a ripple effect across the economies of agriculture-dependent states.

Closer to home, the NYC metro area is facing a rain deficit of about 7 inches since the beginning of the year. And last year was wetter than normal only because of the double whammy of Hurricane Irene and TS Lee, which dumped months worth of rain on the region in the span of a few days causing widespread flooding and massive amounts of damage.

More Than Half Of America Suffering From Drought Conditions

The extreme high temperatures we've been experiencing in the Northeast has been baking much of the South and Midwest to the point that 56% of the country is seeing drought conditions. A significant portion of that is extreme and severe drought.

The drought hasn't been long enough to rank up there with the 1930s Dust Bowl or a bad stretch in the 1950s, David Miskus, a meteorologist at the weather service's Climate Prediction Center, told msnbc.com.

"We don't have that here yet," he said. "This has really only started this year."

But for a single year it's still pretty significant, not far behind an extremely dry 1988.

While 1988 saw much drier conditions and an earlier start to the drought than this year, said Brad Rippey, a meteorologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2012 has its own interesting qualities.

"This year the high temperatures have certainly played into this drought," he told msnbc.com. "There's a lot more evaporation ... and crop demands for water."

The Drought Monitor noted that the drought is starting to "take a significant toll" on food supplies. "In the primary growing states for corn and soybeans, 22 percent of the crop is in poor or very poor condition, as are 43 percent of the nation’s pastures and rangelands and 24 percent of the sorghum crop."

The lack of significant and consistent rains means that the drought is likely to intensify and will contribute to crop damages. That, in turn, is likely to result in higher food prices.

Of course, the extreme temperatures is also straining power grids, sparking severe storms, and people have to take precautions due to the high temperatures.

Heat-related deaths are being reported across the nation, from Baltimore to California.

The best way to prevent such an outcome is to find someplace cool, and to follow some common-sense measures and to check up on the elderly, infirm, and children.

Severe Drought Conditions In Great Plains May Lead To Higher Food Prices

There has been an ongoing drought in the Great Plains states, including Oklahoma and Texas, and there are no indications that the situation will improve anytime soon.

Mike Spradling, the president of the Oklahoma Farm Bureau, said many wheat farmers have considered just plowing under their fields and switching to another crop.

Associate state climatologist Gary McManus said conditions have actually gotten worse since crops began emerging. The plants have rapidly sucked up the limited moisture in the soil.

"Some places have already lost their wheat crop farther south and in the Panhandle," he said. "In the driest parts of the state, the rainfall they have gotten, it's not enough to make them rest easy with their crops. It's just a bad situation."

Paul Fruendt said he's been farming for 25 years and he's never seen such bad growing conditions. His farm in Guthrie in central Oklahoma got a little rain, but he said his crops will still probably run out of water within a few weeks.

Higher wheat prices will translate into higher prices for grains, breads, and other foodstuffs. That, along with higher energy costs, are going to drive up inflation and the cost of living.

The drought conditions also mean that the threat of wildfires increases significantly, and unless the region sees a prolonged period of above-normal rainfall, the drought will persist.

UN Warns Chinese Drought Will Affect Food Prices Globally

China is facing one of the worst droughts in decades and that's going to have a huge effect on global food prices. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization issued an alert Tuesday that a severe drought was threatening the wheat crop in China, which will have a spillover effect on global food prices and will cause shortages of water in China.

World wheat prices are already surging and have been widely cited as one reason for protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. China has been essentially self-sufficient in grain for decades for national security reasons, and any move by China to import large quantities of food in response to the drought could drive international prices even higher, creating serious problems for less affluent countries that rely on imported food.

“China’s grain situation is critical to the rest of the world — if they are forced to go out on the market to procure adequate supplies for their population, it could send huge shock waves through the world’s grain markets,” said Robert S. Zeigler, the director general of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos, Philippines.

The Food and Agriculture Organization said that 5.16 million hectares, or 12.75 million acres, of China’s 14 million hectares of wheat fields had been affected by the drought, and that 2.57 million people and 2.79 million head of livestock faced shortages of drinking water.

Chinese state news media are describing the drought in increasingly dire terms. “Minimal rainfall or snow this winter has crippled China’s major agricultural regions, leaving many of them parched,” reported Xinhua, the state-run news agency. “Crop production has fallen sharply, as the worst drought in six decades shows no sign of letting up.”

Xinhua said that Shandong Province, in the heart of the Chinese wheat belt, had received only 1.2 centimeters, or 0.47 inch, of rain since September but did not provide a comparison for normal rainfall for the period.

While China's wheat crops are in dire shape, the situation in the US isn't all that much better. Parts of the Southern US are dealing with the effects of an ongoing rainfall deficit that have reduced water tables and reservoir levels throughout the region. That too has affected crop prices and quality.