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California: Drought’s Smaller Harvests, Hunger; LA May Lose 70% Water; Desert Springs Run Dry
California drought brings smaller harvests, more hunger among farmworkers. Under sodden gray skies, the 2014 drought feels far away, but its effect is just now being felt in the reduced agricultural yields of the southern Central Valley, where the drought so dried out the farm economy that farmworkers depend on charity to fill their pantries.
Los Angeles could lose 70 percent of its water in the next ‘big one.’ Of all the chaos a massive Southern California earthquake could cause, the most challenging may be losing all four aqueducts supplying the vast majority the region’s water, causing a year or more of extreme rationing.
Once desert springs, now dry. As a boy in the late 1940s, Harry Quinn hiked with his family to a desert spring in the Santa Rosa Mountains where cool water flowed into an oasis filled with tadpoles. Now the spring is dry. The tadpoles and toads are long gone. Four palm trees remain in the dry canyon, two of them dead.
