Drought

A summer of little rainfall has worsened drought conditions across most of Maine, causing wells to once again run dry, farmers to struggle to keep their fall crops watered until harvest and threatening a generation of Maine salmon.
About a million residents are now living under moderate or severe drought conditions in Maine, up 11% since last week, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly, expert-driven map that is based on multiple climate indicators and local field reports.
The patch of severe drought, which accounts for 13.7% of the state, extends from Cumberland County to Penobscot County, along the coast and up into interior Maine north of Bangor. Only a portion of Oxford County north of Gilead is not classified as at least abnormally dry.
“It’s a repeat of last year,” said Ernie Atkinson, a scientist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources, said Thursday at a meeting of the statewide drought task force, an interagency group of scientists that monitors drought conditions in Maine.
“We thought it was better, but clearly the data that’s been presented this morning shows that it’s not,” Atkinson continued. “It’s actually slightly worse because we’re seeing reductions in rainfall. It looked like it was raining more this year, but that was just appearances.”
Atkinson shared his grim fall assessment of juvenile Atlantic salmon. Maine is the only state in the U.S. that still has wild populations of Atlantic salmon that use its rivers to migrate between the freshwater habitat where they are born and the ocean where they mature.
Last year’s drought was so bad, leaving the rivers so dry and the remaining waters there so warm, that Atkinson now believes Maine may have lost a generation of salmon because of it. We’re not finding second-year salmon this year, Atkinson said.
Conditions aren’t much improved this year, he said — groundwater-fed streams are “bone dry.”
“Our driveway now has more water than some of these streams probably do,” Atkinson said.
The summer was much hotter than most people realized, group members agreed. Portland logged its second-hottest meteorological summer on record. And this summer had the fourth-driest July, according to National Weather Service records.
While weather varies from year to year, it is also driven by climate change, which acts like a heat pump that drives up air and water temperatures, evaporates moisture from land and plants and turns normal dry spells into severe droughts.
While berry crops and first cuts of hay benefited from a wet spring, farmers are now reporting a wave of drought-related problems, like stunted plants, premature fruit tree leaf drops, low yields for garlic and peppers and low water levels, according to the Northeast Regional Climate Center.
Most crops need at least an inch of rain a week during the growing season to thrive, with thirsty crops like sweet corn needing double that, said Tom Gordon, public service coordinator at the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry.
Rainfall can vary greatly from location to location, even within the same county, but a statewide precipitation record shows monthly totals between a low of 2.06 inches in July and a high of 4.69 inches in May, suggesting Maine crops weren’t getting nearly enough to drink.
A drought hits Maine agriculture especially hard because only 15% of farms are irrigated, Gordon said.
The agriculture department is trying to change that through drought resilience grants, but the $1 million seed fund and a $300,000 annual appropriation can help between six and 15 farms a year, which isn’t enough, he said.
A $40 million agriculture bond failed to pass at the end of the last legislative session, but Gordon said he is hopeful that measure, which would have supported farm infrastructure, dairy farmers and drought relief, will be revived in January.
Donny Dumont, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Gray, told the group that the summer rainfall was not nearly enough to restore a substantial groundwater deficit left over from last year’s overwintering drought.
“Things could still get much worse as we get into the fall season,” Dumont said.
Despite the midweek rain, the seasonal forecast doesn’t offer much relief, he said. It is projecting slightly drier than normal conditions in the fall, with wetter conditions from the El Nino system not setting in until winter, when the ground is frozen over and can’t recharge.
The Maine Emergency Management Agency is calling on Mainers to conserve water, check their private wells to prepare in case they run dry and report them to the state if they do, monitor farm water availability, and stay informed by monitoring the agency’s website.
The state drinking water program has received drought notifications from public water systems in York, Washington and Hancock counties and 40 dry well reports across 15 counties as of Thursday.