Amazon Drought Now Seen As Worst In 40 Years - KRT

[hatrack]

MANAQUIRI, Brazil - While hurricanes thousands of miles away battered the United States and the Caribbean with water and wind, the residents of this fishing town in the deep Amazon watched the lake they depend on for food and transportation shrivel away. Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians across seven states have been hit this year by the Amazon region's worst drought in four decades, the result, meteorologists say, of warmer ocean water, which also is being blamed for one of the most violent hurricane seasons on record around the Gulf of Mexico.

The summer rains have begun here, but it remains to be seen whether enough water will fall to restore the rivers. The drought has been so severe that Manaquiri was overwhelmed last month by the smell of rotting fish littering the exposed lakebed until the residents of the 14,000-person town gathered them for disposal. Boats that had brought people and produce from other river communities lie scattered on dry land. Malaria, which is common in the area, has proliferated as retreating waters leave stagnant pools behind, ideal for breeding mosquitoes. A federal health worker said low river levels had cut him off from stricken jungle towns.

Environmental activists said several children already had died from common diseases aggravated by the drought. "We can't live like this," said Wanderclia da Silva, a farmer who used to spend just three hours by boat to reach Manaquiri from her community. Her most recent trip took an entire day of canoeing and then walking. "If this continues, we won't be able to live here anymore."

The drought has been most intense around Amazonas state's biggest city, 1.6 million-person Manaus, where cruise ships heading for the Atlantic have been forced to dock far from the urban waterfront, which has been reduced to barren earth covered in heaps of trash. Residents have taken to calling the riverfront the "naked port." "Business has dropped because many of the boats can't come in," said Raimundo Nonato de Oliveira, who runs a restaurant in Manaus on the banks of the Black River. "People here haven't seen anything like it before."

EDIT

http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/world/13064047.htm

[NNadir]

1. Thanks for your continuing reports on climate issues, Hatrack.

I really didn't know about this particular drought until you laid it before us.

You are the bell that tolls for all of us.

I don't know if that's a happy calling, but it is a profound one nonetheless.

Or to mix literary references, recalling something also said beside another river, "The horror. The horror."

[phantom power]

2. I wonder how long the drought lasted 40 years ago.

Will things be different this time? Many things have surely changed over 40 years, and not for the better.