CONCORD, N.C. — Each day before they leave their western North Carolina home, Marcine and Arne Fennel clasp hands, close their eyes and pray.
These days, in particular, they are praying for rain to fill the depleted lakes and end the worst drought their area has seen in 50 years.
"Has the rain a father?" Mrs. Fennel, quoting from the Book of Job, asks, her right hand raised palmward to the sky. "Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, that an abundance of water may cover you?"
"Lord," her husband rejoins, "we ask that you bring the rain. Replenish our land. Replenish our streams, our lakes, our reservoirs. Lord God, bring us the rain so that we may survive."
Similar prayers can be heard all across the South, which is in its third straight year of drought.
Florida has been gripped since 1998 by the worst dry spell since records started being kept in 1895. Mighty Lake Okeechobee is so dry that exposed water vegetation has caught fire.
In central Georgia, farmers planting this year's corn crop kick up clouds of dust plowing fields that a new 4-inch soaking barely penetrated. North Carolina just finished the second-driest winter on record. Scientists even suspect the lack of fresh water reaching estuaries could be behind last year's low white shrimp harvest off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia.
The region is supposed to be entering another wet season, but officials aren't counting their chickens just yet.
"Certainly for ground water it'll be a year before it catches up, unless we get several tropical storms or hurricanes," says Jim O'Brien, Florida's state climatologist. "If they want their bream pond to come back, they need a hurricane."
Most of Florida, a large swath of western North Carolina and a small area of northern South Carolina are under extreme or exceptional drought conditions, according to the latest Drought Monitor.
Most of Georgia and the Carolinas are experiencing moderate drought. And large areas of Kentucky, Tennessee, eastern North Carolina and southern Virginia are abnormally dry.
That might surprise anyone who dropped into central Georgia or parts of the Carolinas in recent weeks. Heavy downpours soaked large areas.
"It was too wet to even get my tractor out in there," says Sam Baker, drought specialist at the Southeast Regional Climate Center in Columbia, S.C. "But that doesn't mean that if I dig down a foot and a half to put in a post that I'm not going to get in just powder-dry soil."
