Is the Drought Broken?
1 Comment Published March 10th, 2010 in Color Country Information, Personal Conservation, Southern Utah Wildlife and Nature.
This last storm had a lot of water in it.
When I fed the birds this morning, their seed dish had at least a full inch of water in it. That’s a lot of water in a 24 hour period. The mountains are white. The little ponds I have dug around the house are all full because the ground is saturated now. (My goal is to make sure that if a drop of water falls up here, it stays up here.)
From my back yard, it looked like the drought has been broken – at least for the time being. That’s a big relief. Last fall, I wrote that We Need Some Rain!. The Virgin River basin was down to less than a quarter of normal; the worst in the state.
I decided to check into that in more detail so I looked up the actual numbers from the US Natural Resources Conservation Service. If you look at the totals starting on January 1, you can see that this last storm has put us at least four inches ahead of last year. The big storm at the end of January was a huge boost too.
But the dry fall I complained about in October makes the total water year (which starts October 1) still only about normal. We’re now at 24.1 inches at Kolob. At this same time in 2009, we were at 24.4 inches – the 2009 water year was still just slightly better so far.
So if you think this storm is going to fill up Lake Powell, think again.
I went to Price yesterday (down in the morning, watched two baseball games at CEU, then went to visit Daddy, then home in the evening – long day). There was water seeping out of the canyon wall in a place that I’ve NEVER seen water seep before (can’t remember exactly where it was), and the waterfall (the one in the horseshoe-shaped indentation in the canyon wall) was still frozen, but it was huge – much larger than I’ve ever seen it before. – So I guess there’s additional water in this part of the state also. And this part of the state usually has little water. They also had more snow down there this past winter than they’ve had since I was a little girl, I think. – But not enough, as you stated, to fill Lake Powell.