"The Rodney Dangerfield Of Extreme Events"
Usually when I'm doing weather stories somewhere along the Texas, Oklahoma corridor you can almost bet that I'll be in grown-up galoshes or hip waders. We've seen tremendous rainfall in the center of the United States, some continues in the Midwest. The opposite is the case in the southeast, where I have been working on a story on the droughts.
Larry Allen is a local hay and dairy farmer in McDonough Georgia. Point your car south from Hartsfield airport, toward Macon and then a series of left right zigzags over paved road and unpaved will get you to the center of his 400 or so acres, where his dairy cows masticate, and his hay isn't really growing. He has had about half the rain as normal, and he walked me down into what used to be a running creek- a source of water for his cattle. He has to borrow water from his neighbors, and pay county prices to be able to water the cows.
A little "did you know" that a city slicker like me picks up on stories like this is that a mamma cow or a bull can guzzle 15-25 gallons of water a day, and eat 2-4% of its body weight. That's a lot of water and a lot of hay or grass. Without much rain, both get very expensive.
Look at the number of counties in the southeast that have scorched earth and it is somewhere close to 98% of the region. States like Alabama and Georgia and Tennessee which are breaking records for consistently high temperatures have it perhaps the worst. There are people essentially praying for tropical storm level rains- because an inch or two is going to get cooked right off.
Video: A climatologist we spoke to described drought as the Rodney Dangerfield of extreme events because it doesn't get any respect.