Drought increases as severe weather hammers regions from the Midwest to the East Coast

This week, a region from the Midwest to the East Coast was hammered by strong winds, heavy rains and tornadoes. Hundreds of thousands of customers were without power as record temperatures rolled-in and spiked thermometers across the path of the storms. 

A suburb of Iowa’s capital city Des Moines was struck by two tornadoes as the storm front came through.

A derecho and a tornado struck Chicago and nearby suburbs. Winds over 75 miles per hour along a 250 mile path hit the windy city and points east.

In downstate Illinois, a dam broke after the rain dropped up to seven inches on the community of Nashville. City officials in the town of 3,000 reported that 300 people were in the evacuation zone. 

Heavy rains in Arkansas dropped as much as 11 inches of precipitation across the state. Flash flooding took out a bridge and forced the evacuation of a local nursing home.

  A tornado destroyed homes and smashed church steeples in the Upstate New York city of Rome.

As the storm blew out, the thermometer rose across much of the affected region with temperatures 8 to 10 degrees above normal. In the heavy weather week, several places across the Midwest received rainfall up to 800 percent above normal.

Despite the rain, drought conditions intensified by more than two points showing that more than half of the country was in some form of drought. Portions of Kansas and Oklahoma, along with areas in the Southeast, have gotten drier since the last report. 

The outlook is for cooler than seasonal temperatures and lower moisture levels over much of the Plains, South and Southeast. Parts of Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico are expected to see temperatures 11 degrees below normal. 

For Market to Market, I’m David Miller.

contact: miller@iowapbs.org