Weather System That Soaks Midwest Is Baking Southeast

While rain and floodwaters continue to wash across the Midwest, the Southeast’s fields and forests are parched from lack of rain and soaring temperatures.

Rain has fallen only as isolated thunderstorms and scattered showers over many areas in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia.

The weather pattern is the closest thing the region has seen to a drought since the disastrous summer of 1986.

Farmers are already facing substantial losses, not only in the crops but in the tillage, planting and chemical costs they have incurred.

In some areas, corn is stunted and twisted, and cotton that is normally knee-high is flowering while only about six inches above ground.

Some pastureland is so dry that even pigweed, which can survive in the desert, is wilting.

South Carolina is reporting the highest agricultural losses so far--nearly $200 million worth, representing 15% of the total value of the state’s agriculture products this year.

That compares to a loss of $160 million in the state during the ’86 drought, according to officials at the Clemson University Crop Extension Service.

Corn has suffered the heaviest damage, followed by tobacco, hay and livestock and dairy products.

In Washington this week, Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.) asked President Clinton for emergency aid to help the state’s farmers.

“The flip side of the flood is in South Carolina, where the lack of water is driving our farmers off the ground,” Hollings said. “I believe the President should examine the dry conditions in South Carolina so he’ll know that we need the same kind of financial aid he has proposed for farmers in the Midwest.”

Jeff Savadel, a federal meteorologist in Washington, offered the following explanation of the current weather system: “Overall there has been a Bermuda High, or high-pressure ridge, that has been keeping hot, humid weather across the Southeast.

“This ridge also feeds a lot of moisture northwards towards the Midwest. Also, the jet stream has been farther south than normal for this time of year, and that has been dumping all the rain in the Midwest.”

Tom Trantham, of Pelzer, S.C., a dairy farmer with 160 cows to feed, talks lovingly of the friends he made among the farmers in the Midwest when they came to his aid during the “haylift” to the South during the ’86 drought.

Saying he’s down to his last five bales of hay, Trantham is again worried about the fate of his farm and his herd.

“I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t find food,” he said. “I couldn’t stand to lose my herd to hunger.

“The sad thing is that now that it’s time for me to turn around and help my friends in the Midwest, I’m empty-handed. They opened their hearts and their barn doors to me, and now their barns are full of water.”