Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
Water water everywhere; not quite everywhere.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Conditions in Oklahoma and parts of Texas are surpassing the historic Dust Bowl catastrophy of the 1930’s. Farmland is blowing away, cattle don’t have enough feed and crops are dying in the ground. This is the worst drought in Oklahoma history.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued an agricultural disaster declaration for 9 counties in Oklahoma last week.
Meanwhile…
15 million people in the Horn of Africa are in peril due, in part, to drought.
Horrific disasters like the ones last month in China and Burma have relief agencies buckling under the pressure of what they feel is going to be a “powerful, and quickly growing ‘tsunami’ in the form of an unprecedented global food crisis.”
The U.N. is figuring nearly 800 million people across the world will be in real danger of starvation.
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Flooded Ukraine lost up to 50% of harvests.
Even after the waters recede it will be impossible to save potato and other root crops. The Potato crops that can be harvested will be unable to store due to moisture content, even on a short-term basis.
Fruit’s in trouble too. The harvest of apricots, peaches and early apples and pears had to be halted because of flooding.
The death toll has already reached 30. More than 50,000 are preparing for evacuation today as water agencies prepare to release thousands of cubic metres per second water to ease mounting pressure on some dams.
Thousands of children have been evacuated from summer resorts near the Dniester and Prut rivers. The sluices at several hydropower plants are currently operating at 6 and 7 times more than their operating capacity.
In the U.S., New Mexico’s Rio Ruidoso surged from it’s seasonal average of 4 feet to 12 feet on Saturday. The flooding there has destroyed 12 bridges in the area. Though these bridges were on secondary and residential streets the cost to replace them is going to be staggaring. Thanks to hurricane Dolly’s remnants. 400 people were evacuated, and 200 campers were cut off by the floods in nearby forest sites.
12,000 people evacuated from flooding in Romania are beginning to return home today. 1,400 bridges, 2,000 homes and more than 20,000 hectares of farmlands were flooded there.
In July flooding has killed at least 350 people in India and over 50,000 homes have been devastated.
The crop losses are still being calculated in the United States from flooding on the Mississippi river in the past weeks.
Labels: Agriculture disaster, Flood, Food Crisis, Food Shortage, drought
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Water water everywhere; not quite everywhere.
