This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2004, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
It's official: The six-year drought currently gripping Utah is a disaster.
Gov. Olene Walker issued a "Declaration of Agricultural Disaster" for the state Tuesday. She also sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman asking for relief for the state's agricultural community, which is expecting an estimated $133 million hit to its bottom line as a result of the dry spell.
The silver lining for the state's farmers and ranchers is that Utah's county and state employees have the emergency-relief process down cold after five straight years crunching numbers and filing paperwork leading up to this summer, meaning the steps to get federal aid might move more quickly than for those states new to the drought-disaster game.
"I think the process has been greased," said Utah Commissioner of Agriculture and Food Cary G. Peterson. "Most of the staffers know what to do now."
In a letter to the governor last week, Peterson reported that 21 of the state's 29 counties are suffering "extreme drought" conditions, and the remaining eight "also suffer from drought conditions, and are worthy of inclusion in a disaster declaration."
Besides drought, farmers and ranchers have lost crops and forage to insect infestation, hail, high winds, flash floods and fires, and the $133 million in losses amounts to roughly 30 percent of their products' typical value - the trigger amount for qualifying for an agricultural disaster declaration from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and with it, federal relief.
"The very low snowpack in our mountains, coupled with extremely low soil moisture, has resulted in far below normal runoff," Walker wrote in her Friday letter to Veneman. "This has contributed to reservoir storage that has dropped to historic levels that are low to nonexistent in some areas."
The physical manifestations of the drought are obvious throughout the state, whether through the depleted state reservoirs or the sight of ranchers hauling water by truck to their cattle.
"We have some counties, Salt Lake County being one of them, that have had normal precipitation in spring or summer, showers and rain events," Peterson said. "Outside this Wasatch corridor, we have a lot of counties that are suffering. They don't have a lot of water storage and they haven't had the general thundershowers or storm events that have been [occurring] along here."
How quickly the department responds to Walker's request will determine how quickly help arrives for the state's farmers and ranchers.
"It takes at least a couple of weeks, and sometimes a reminder," Peterson said. "We've seen it string out for a month in the past, when it's been hung up at some lower-level desk.
"Once they're satisfied that we're qualified, they're good to process that. What follows in the way of congressional appropriations remains to be seen, but at least this opens the door and gets the process moving. Any of those [appropriations] become available, then our producers are in line for that."
Seeking relief
The 21 counties that will qualify for relief, if their numbers hold up under review by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, are:
l Beaver
l Box Elder
l Cache
l Carbon
l Emery
l Garfield
l Grand
l Iron
l Juab
l Kane
l Millard
l Piute
l Rich
l Salt Lake
l San Juan
l Sanpete
l Sevier
l Summit
l Tooele
l Washington
l Wayne