Illinois is dangerously dry. Decades of policy negligence have left the state unprepared, and the crisis is only beginning.<\/p>\n
Last week, the U.S. Drought Monitor<\/a> showed parts of 19 Central Illinois counties are suffering from \u201cextreme drought.\u201d That means<\/a> we\u2019re looking at \u201cmajor crop\/pasture losses, extreme fire danger, widespread water shortages or restrictions,\u201d according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. All of Champaign County, where I live, is in an extreme drought.<\/p>\n Statewide, 80.88% of Illinois is under some level of drought and another 15% is \u201cabnormally dry.\u201d Over 90% of Lake, Kane and McHenry counties are currently \u201cabnormally dry,\u201d and portions of Cook, Will and DuPage counties are as well, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, which is produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NOAA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.<\/p>\n The downstate city of Sullivan declared a water emergency<\/a> after the water table dropped 15 feet in recent months; residents are restricted to essential use only. Bloomington is asking residents to voluntarily conserve water. Wells are running low, rivers are down, and farmers describe the situation heading into the growing season as \u201cnerve-wracking<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n This drought must be understood in the context of Illinois\u2019 land use decisions. Between fall harvest and spring planting, millions of acres of Illinois cropland sit bare, soil exposed to wind and rain. If the drought persists into planting season, spring winds could bring more of the dust storms<\/a> that have plagued the state in recent years.<\/p>\n The Illinois State Climatologist<\/a>, which provides weather and climate data, flagged a \u201cblowing dust<\/a> risk\u201d last fall, when conditions were less severe than what we have now.<\/p>\n Making matters worse, roughly 10 million acres of Illinois farmland are equipped with subsurface tile drainage, designed to move water off fields and into waterways as quickly as possible, ultimately sending it, along with hundreds of millions of pounds of nutrient pollution<\/a>, to the Gulf of Mexico, where it feeds a massive dead zone<\/a>. Few drainage systems have control structures, so water leaves the land whether we need it or not. In a drought, that\u2019s water we can\u2019t get back.<\/p>\n