Weather or Not | Forget hurricanes; it's a drought coming

Any day now, frightening, multicolored images of a major hurricane spinning across the Atlantic will capture our attention as surely as it will wring out advertising dollars for the Weather Channel.

But don't be too surprised if the next natural disaster around here is of a quieter nature, and one that we won't see coming: drought.

We can guarantee it will happen. It's just a matter of when. Since 1980, our analysis shows that the Philadelphia region has been in some state of drought better than 20 percent of the time. (We haven't experienced a serious dry spell in more than five years, but they hit about every third year on average before then.)

Back in April, you may recall, we were up to our tire wells in rainwater. But drought conditions have spread insidiously across the country since May.
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