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It's not just hot -- it's dry.
All of Kentucky is in severe drought for the first time since late 1999, according to Palmer Drought Severity Index numbers released yesterday.
State officials on Friday issued a water shortage warning for Bowling Green and Warren County, where the Barren River flow is at its lowest level since the Barren River Reservoir was completed in 1963.
There also have been problems in Manchester in Clay County because demand for water outstripped treatment capacity.
Most other water systems are holding their own, said Bill Caldwell of the state Division of Water.
With a couple more weeks of August heat and little or no rain, problems could occur in plenty of places, including Lexington, he said.
One reason there aren't already more water supply problems, Caldwell said, is that the drought is worse in Eastern and Western Kentucky, and those areas are, in some cases, better able to deal with a prolonged lack of rain.
In Eastern Kentucky, a wet winter left plenty of water deep in layers of rocks, he said. Much of Western Kentucky gets water from the Ohio River or from deep wells that haven't been affected by the drought.
The state's Central and Bluegrass regions, which depend on smaller rivers or reservoirs, haven't been quite as dry. The Central region was on the boundary between moderate and severe, but was considered severe because of rounding.
Tom Priddy, a meteorologist with the University of Kentucky Agricultural Weather Center, said lack of rain has been hard on farmers' crops and livestock.
Priddy's research yesterday afternoon showed that the weekly Palmer Index had not shown all four of the state's climatological regions in severe drought since December 1999.
The U.S. Drought Monitor, another measure of dryness, shows a strip of southern and northeastern Kentucky in severe drought, with the area in between in the moderate category.
