Bad Weather, with Dividends

Snow, gales and goodbye drought

The water was heated to a soothing 80DEG, so the pool was full of happy swimmers. But not so happy was Lifeguard Steve Tourville. Watching over his charges, he sat in his chair wearing a suit of thermal underwear and three sweaters. Is this a Colorado ski resort scene? No, just an unusual 36DEG day at Walt Disney World in Florida. Across a broad sweep of the country last week, winter howled in with bone-numbing force. In the nation's capital, temperatures dropped 20DEG, to near zero, during a one-hour period.

Wind-chill factors turned scores of cities into veritable frostbite wards. From Michigan to the Carolinas, the cold became so severe that generating difficulties forced widespread cutbacks in electric power. At least 16 deaths were attributed to the weather.

Many of those, of course, were caused by gale-force winds and snow and ice storms. From the Canadian border to Virginia, the East Coast was battered by rain, sleet, snow and exceptionally high seas. New York City officials reported that 25% of Rockaway Beach was swept away by the pounding surf, while in Maine a combination of heavy rains and brutal winds wiped out coastal bridges and flooded shoreline cottages. Ohio Governor James Rhodes declared a snow emergency and called out 150 National Guardsmen to help Cleveland dig out from under massive drifts that had smothered the city. The West Coast too was washed by storms: a Pacific gale and a drenching rain sent huge waves crashing along the California coast, causing mudslides and damage to many shoreside homes.

South of the Mason-Dixon line, the onslaught of winter was no less vicious. A sleet storm came roaring out of Texas at midweek. In such cities as Birmingham and Memphis, the storm disrupted traffic and closed down schools and businesses. In Atlanta, where there are still fresh memories of a 1973 ice storm that downed trees and knocked out power lines for a week, the ominous reports emerging from Alabama and Tennessee sent downtown workers hurrying home early.

The mercury plunged, too, in the Midwest, where temperatures dropped as low as -25DEG in Bismarck, N. Dak., and -17DEG in Minneapolis. But there and in the West, the weather was so bad that it turned out to be good: the rain and snow fell in such massive volume that the worrisome two-year-old drought seemed virtually to be over.

Indeed, last week the executive committee of the Western Regional Drought Action Task Force, a 21-state organization formed to cope with mutual water problems, recommended that the group disband. Only California and Colorado will keep their drought task forces in operation.

In California, the state worst hit by the drought, precipitation during the rainy season so far has been 125% to 130% above normal. More important, the snow pack in the High Sierras, which provides California with the bulk of its water, is in some places twice as deep as it usually is at this time of year.

Some experts insist that it is too early to tell for sure if the drought is definitely washed up. Subterranean water tables are still way down, partly because farmers have depended heavily on well water to irrigate crops. But the major crisis has indisputably passed. The reason: a massive Eastern Pacific high-pressure system, which had long been stuck off the Northern California coast, finally dissipated. Now moisture-laden air coming in from the Pacific can flow over the Western states as usual during the winter instead of being shunted aside by the out-of-place high.

While 1977 was a bumper year in dollar sales volume for California agriculture, farmers' net income was down an estimated 14% from the previous year. The reason is that the drought forced them to spend more money to drill wells (about 15,000 new ones), buy new irrigation equipment and pay for the electric power needed to run it. The state's livestock industry lost an estimated $500 million in 1977; this year, according to the drought task force's Gordon Snow, "there'll be grass on the ranges for the first time in three years, and ranchers will start building herds again."

Parts of Colorado and other Western states are still badly parched, but deep snow in the Rockies promises a heavy runoff and good, soggy fields in the spring --not to mention a prosperous winter for ski resort operators. Says South Dakota Agriculture Director Robert Duxbury, echoing many happy officials, farmers and businessmen who live west of the Mississippi: "The turn-around has been unbelievable."

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