Droughts

Aisha Sufi, a woman with tired eyes and nine children, waits for a water truck in a nation of drought. She is one of an estimated 150,000 Yemenis who have left their villages this year bound for Sana, Yemen's capital, in search of basic needs. Water and jobs, for example, are increasingly scarce in rural regions where many populations have quadrupled since the 1980s. "It's not good here or there, but it's better to be here," said Sufi, who lives in the Hoshaishiya neighborhood of Sana.

Water built the semi-arid San Joaquin Valley into an agricultural powerhouse. Drought and irrigation battles now threaten to turn huge swaths of it into a dust bowl. Farmers have idled half a million acres of once-productive ground and are laying off legions of farmhands. That's sending joblessness soaring in a region already plagued by chronic poverty. Water scarcity looms as a major challenge to California's $37-billion agricultural industry, which has long relied on imported water to bloom.

Even with the recent batch of rainstorms, the ongoing drought has grown so severe that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on Monday called for increased citywide water restrictions and the adoption of a tiered water rate that would punish Department of Water and Power customers who fail to conserve. Sprinkler use would be restricted to two days a week under the proposal and, by summer, could be cut to one day a week if the drought continues, Villaraigosa said.

With California's budget crisis resolved for the moment, state lawmakers Thursday turned their attention to another emergency: a three-year drought that has left key reservoirs at 35% of capacity. Legislators stepped forward with plans to ask voters to borrow as much as $15 billion for projects to expand and improve the state's water supply. "This is the session to aggressively solve California's water challenges," Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said Thursday.

Joe Penn, a Kentucky horse and mule auctioneer, is not a sentimental man -- not once he enters the stockyard. He knows that the value of many horses is measured in pounds of flesh. But this winter, the horses are thinner than usual, and Penn finds himself wondering what becomes of the creatures with bare ribs and flat rumps, the ones that now sell for as little as $10. "I wonder," Penn said. "And then I tell myself I probably don't want to know."

C. Barton Crattie, a Georgia land surveyor, did not expect to start a border war when he penned a newspaper article about a flawed 1818 survey that placed his state a mile below the Tennessee River. The mistake in calculating Georgia's northern corner, he figured, was just an odd historical footnote, an interesting digression for those who fret that the drought-stricken state will soon run out of water. "Unfortunately for . . .

A controversial Southern California drought plan that has divided area cities is expected to win approval today from the Metropolitan Water District board, with strong backing from Los Angeles and San Diego. The allocation plan, a guide for divvying up water among 26 cities and districts during a severe shortage, won unanimous approval Monday from a key MWD panel. The full board will take up the plan at noon today, although recent rains may forestall its use this year.

The Metropolitan Water District board Tuesday approved a much-disputed drought plan despite protests from officials in some southeastern Los Angeles County cities who complained that low-income residents would be penalized with higher rates. Using a weighted voting system that is keyed to property valuation and not population, the 37-member board voted 176,523 to 14,265 to support the plan.

Corn is a key element of the U.S. food supply. It is what dairy cows eat to make milk and hens consume to lay eggs. It fattens cattle, hogs and chickens before slaughter. It makes soda sweet. As the building block of ethanol, it is now also a major component of auto fuel. And that may signal trouble ahead.

The public agency that distributes water to much of the Southland is urging residents to reduce consumption by 10% to 20% to protect reserves during a worsening drought. "We're coming to the point in Southern California life where there's no room for water waste," said Anthony Fellow, vice chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Water District, which distributes imported water to 18 million people from Ventura County to the Mexican border.