Central China Hit by Drought, as Reservoirs Become ‘Dead Water’

BEIJING — A severe drought along the Yangtze River region in central China has rendered nearly 1,400 reservoirs in Hubei Province temporarily unusable, devastated farm fields and made drinking water scarce, according to a report on Monday by Xinhua, the state news agency.

The drought, which has lasted for five months, has brought water levels in the middle part of the Yangtze to a near-record low. For the second time since the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric project, began operating, officials have had to make emergency water discharges from it to help ease the drought.

As of Sunday, 4 medium-size reservoirs and 1,388 small reservoirs in Hubei had dropped below the allowable discharge levels for irrigation, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, citing the director of the reservoir management office for the Hubei Provincial Water Resources Department. One-fourth of all small reservoirs had what officials called “dead water” remaining, which could be pumped for use only in an emergency.

The drought adds to concerns over the effect that a gargantuan water-diversion project will have on the central provinces of China. The project, called the South-North Water Diversion, is supposed to move water from the Yangtze and its tributaries north to Beijing along a canal, and to Tianjin along an eastern route.

Both routes are supposed to be fully operational within the next couple of years. Criticism of the project has become widespread, and many people along the Yangtze and in the south say precious water resources should not be sent north, where there has been a chronic water shortage.

The water on the middle route is supposed to flow from the Danjiangkou Reservoir in Hubei. The water level at the reservoir was measured at 443 feet on Saturday, about 13 feet below the level at which the water is considered dead, Xinhua reported.

Du Yun, a geography scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei, said in an earlier interview that the central government had not done enough studies to assess the impact of the diversion project, especially when compared with all the research that was done before the building of the Three Gorges Dam.

“For that project, the preliminary discussion and studies phase was decades long,” he said. “There was the participation of institutions and experts from across China. Compared to that, this water diversion project did not do as comprehensive a preliminary study as the Three Gorges project did.”

As of Saturday, the drought had left 315,000 people and 97,300 head of livestock in Hubei short of drinking water, and more than two million acres of farmland had been affected, Xinhua reported. In neighboring Henan Province, the drought had affected at least 320,000 people.

Officials discharged 400 million cubic meters of water from the Three Gorges Dam from May 7 to May 11, according to Wang Hai, a spokesman for the dam’s construction and operation management bureau, Xinhua reported on Thursday.

This discharge is aimed at fighting the current drought and raising levels of the Yangtze to aid shipping. People in the city of Yichang, where the dam stands, have been hit especially hard. They say they have had to buy water rather than relying on water from their land.

The water levels in the section of the Yangtze between Yichang and Jiujiang in Jiangxi Province were about 8 to 18 feet lower than average, Xinhua reported, citing a statement by the Hubei provincial flood control and drought relief headquarters.

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Survivor of Dust Bowl Now Battles a Fiercer Drought

With a drought continuing to punish much of the Great Plains, this one stands out. Boise (rhymes with voice) City has gone 222 consecutive days through Tuesday with less than a quarter-inch of rainfall in any single day, said Gary McManus, a state climatologist. That is the longest such dry spell here since note-keeping began in 1908.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s, caused in part by the careless gouging of the earth in an effort to farm it, created an epic environmental disaster. Experts say it is unlikely to be repeated because farming has changed so much. Boise City recovered from the Dust Bowl and has periodically enjoyed bountiful years since.

But this drought is a reminder of just how parched and unyielding life can be along this wind-raked frontier, fittingly called No Man’s Land, and it is not clear how many more ups and downs Boise City can take.

“The community is drying up,” Mark Axtell, the area’s only funeral director, said on a walk through the cemetery, where brown tufts of buffalo grass crunched underfoot.

In the last decade, Boise City lost almost 16 percent of its population, according to the 2010 census. Just 1,312 people live here now — far fewer than the 3,000 who bought the first lots in 1908, only to discover that they had been hoodwinked. The land was inhospitable, and promises of railroads, water and trees (Boise is from the French “le bois,” meaning trees) were a fraud.

Boise City became the county seat for Cimarron County. But now, the county, too, has sagged. In the last decade it lost 21 percent of its population. Its 2,475 residents are spread so thin over such a wide expanse that an average of only 1.3 people occupy each square mile.

The young have little reason to stay. The old are dying or moving away to be closer to their children or to medical facilities, since Boise City’s only nursing home has closed.

“Last year, we did half as many funerals as the year I took over,” said Mr. Axtell, 48, who bought the business 25 years ago. “Last year was my fourth consecutive low year.”

The plunge in funerals prompted him to buy a cafe last year to supplement his income. Called the Rockin’ A, its 12 tables have become the town’s social hub.

But the main street outside is deserted, and many storefronts are shuttered. Most people shop at the Wal-Mart 60 miles away.

Residents blame a lack of jobs — not the drought — for the town’s decline. Dry spells come and go, they say, and coping with them is baked into their psyches. Many who live here are descended from those souls who endured the Dust Bowl and have reaped harvests aplenty since; they are bound to the land and not easily discouraged.

“Your die-hards will stay here,” Rebecca Smoot, 58, whose family homesteaded here in the early 1900s, said during breakfast at the Rockin’ A. She lives in Boise City but works as a corrections officer just over the border in Texas. “They stayed here during the Dirty Thirties when everyone else was moving. That’s the way a lot of the people ended up with a lot of the land.”

Those who stayed then are deemed successful now, though many were too poor at the time to leave with the “Okies.”

Huston Hanes, 87, who lived through the Dust Bowl on a farm in eastern Cimarron County, said he would never forget the wind blowing fine dust particles throughout his house and how quickly the wet cloths he held over his face to protect his lungs would turn black. But he said he was glad his family stayed.

“We have hard times, but any place you go, you’re going to have some adversity,” he said with a shrug. “We don’t have that many tornadoes.”