Drought affects everybody: Fireworks vendors see steep decline in sales during drought, burn ban.
Norris Marx, owner of Norris Hotshot Fireworks, said the drought has really hurt their sales this summer.
Marx has been selling fireworks for eight years and said this has been the worst year he has seen so far.
While they have had people still buying, Marx said they’re asking everybody to not light them off and wait until New Years.
… We need everybody to pray for rain.” He said he believes that the potential consequences people could face for lighting them has served as a deterrent for people even purchasing fireworks.
… The punishment doesn’t maybe really fit the crime.” Marx said people in the area have been very cautious about the decisions they are making when it comes to fireworks and the burn ban.
“I definitely did not think we’d been in a drought or a fire ban.” While Braun sells fireworks for a hobby, he said he knows a lot of people who depend on the sales for part of their livelihood.
“I know a lot of people that that’s all they do, they sell fireworks and that’s their income for the year,” he said.
It’s always a risk.” However, Marx knows the drought affects much more than just fireworks sales.
He believes his business has already been hurt by the city of Dickinson not allowing fireworks sales within the city, so he does not want people to panic next year if conditions get dry quickly and cause a burn ban to go into effect.

THUNE: Drought assistance is on the way.
For most folks, the holiday usually means backyard barbecues, parades, fireworks, and a break from the usual nine-to-five grind.
Unless you’re a farmer or rancher, that is.
Every day is a workday.
Now is one of those times.
I’ve been working with U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Sonny Perdue to identify ways that we can get some much-needed assistance to livestock producers faster and break down unnecessary bureaucratic barriers that make farming and ranching more difficult, particularly now during the drought.
On one hand, USDA was telling producers to destroy useable hay on some CRP-enrolled acres.
Shortly after the announcement about hay destruction, I shared a bit of South Dakota common sense with Secretary Perdue: You should never destroy hay when it could be used to feed cattle and help livestock owners who are struggling, especially during a severe drought.
I also encouraged him to authorize emergency haying and grazing on CRP-enrolled land in all counties that have a border within 150 miles of a county that’s been approved for emergency haying or grazing of CRP.
In the meantime, I encourage those with CRP acres they want to use for haying or grazing to contact their local Farm Service Agency office as soon as possible to begin the approval process for this assistance.

Paper: ‘Defining Ecological Drought for the 21st Century’.
Crausbay, S., A. Ramirez, S. Carter, M. Cross, K. Hall, D. Bathke, J. Betancourt, S. Colt, A. Cravens, M. Dalton, J. Dunham, L. Hay, M. Hayes, J. McEvoy, C. McNutt, M. Moritz, K. Nislow, N. Raheem, and T. Sanford, 2017: Defining ecological drought for the 21st century.
Bull.
Amer.
Meteor.
Soc.
doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-16-0292.1 From lines 64 – 72: To prepare us for the rising risk of drought in the 21st century, we need to reframe the drought conversation by underscoring the value to human communities in sustaining ecosystems and the critical services they provide when water availability dips below critical thresholds.
In particular, we need to define a new type of drought—ecological drought—that integrates the ecological, climatic, hydrological socioeconomic, and cultural dimensions of drought.
To this end, we define the term ecological drought as an episodic deficit in water availability that drives ecosystems beyond thresholds of vulnerability, impacts ecosystem services, and triggers feedbacks in natural and/or human systems.
Enjoy!

Mass.
The drought in Massachusetts biotech IPOs is over.
While a pair of Cambridge-based cancer drug developers sold their shares last week in the first initial public offerings since January, there was little evidence their success was a harbinger of a new stampede of local biotechs into the public markets.
Another biotech scheduled to price its shares last week, Akcea Therapeutics Inc., also of Cambridge, postponed its offering, but remains poised for an IPO that could raise as much as $125 million.
Its proposed haul is substantially larger than the $75 million raised by Mersana — which is developing a class of medicines known as antibody drug conjugates to treat different cancers — and the $56.2 million raised by Aileron, which is developing a treatment called stapled peptides to fight cancers and other diseases.
“A lot of investors are still looking at health care, but they are being more selective.” Aileron chief executive Joe Yanchik said the increased selectivity may be healthy for the industry because companies will need to demonstrate that they have a reasonable chance of succeeding.
“In this market, you have to show that something works.” While investors have grown more confident drug makers will be able to dodge government price controls, which was viewed as a potential threat at the start of 2017, “there’s still a huge amount of uncertainty in the country on a political and economic level,” said industry consultant Jonathan P. Gertler, chief executive of Back Bay Life Science Advisors in Boston.
Gertler said the five-month lull in Massachusetts biotech IPOs — following several years of heavy activity with many companies going public — may have been broken not because of a change in the market’s dynamics, but simply because a couple of promising companies wanted to complete their offerings before the July Fourth weekend.
It’s incredibly quiet relative to the robust years, but good fundamental companies are still going to be able to get out into the public market.” Before last week, the state’s last biotech IPO came on Jan. 27 when another Cambridge cancer drug startup, Jounce Therapeutics Inc., raised $104 million.
Myomo Inc., a Cambridge medical robotics company, raised $5 million in an IPO earlier this month.

The last time that Cruz went more than a month between homers was 2011 when he had a 31-day drought late in the season, but he missed more than two weeks in that stretch because of a strained left hamstring.
***It’s a marquee pitching matchup: Felix Hernandez (3-2 with a 4.66 ERA) vs. Kansas City left-hander Danny Duffy (4-4, 3.54).
***Hernandez is 5-5 with a 2.76 ERA in 13 career starts against the Royals.
He made one start against them last season and pitched 7 1/3 shutout innings in a 1-0 victory at Safeco Field.
***Duffy is 0-1 in six career games against the Mariners but has a 2.01 ERA.
***The last rookie to be leading the American League in batting at the All-Star break was a guy named Mike Trout, who was batting .341 in 2012 for the Los Angeles Angels.
(The standard is 3.1 plate appearances times the number of games played by the club.
***This is the fourth time the Mariners and Royals have played on Independence Day.
The starting pitcher went at least six innings in all 10 games and seven or more innings in five of the 10 games.
Buhner had 22 two-homer games in his career.

DAILY DIGEST, 4th of July edition: Plans advance to enlarge major Bay Area reservoir; California’s lakes are full but fishing remains in a drought; LA DWP won’t drill new wells in Bishop; and more ….
In California water news today, Plans advance to enlarge major Bay Area reservoir; California’s lakes are full but fishing remains in a drought; Human toll mounts in California’s rivers after boy drowns, man disappears, and two bodies are found; Marin officially puts drenching year in the record books; Owens Valley: LA DWP won’t drill new wells in Bishop; New Mexico water agency finds innovative way to protect headwaters Happy 4th of July!
The plan would raise the reservoir’s earthen dam by 55 feet, to 273 feet high.
That would make it the second tallest dam in the Bay Area, eclipsed only by Warm Springs Dam, at 319 feet tall, on Lake Sonoma near Healdsburg.
… ” Read more from the San Jose Mercury News here: Plans advance to enlarge major Bay Area reservoir California’s lakes are full but fishing remains in a drought: “As he prepared to launch his fishing boat from the dock at Castaic Lake, longtime angler Dan Curtis recalled conditions two years earlier when the state’s worst drought shriveled the reservoir to nearly a third of its total capacity.
The lake is now near capacity, but below the surface of the water, not everything has returned to normal.
First responders and law enforcement agencies in the state’s low-lying communities have been sounding the alarm for months that as the state transitioned into spring and now summer, the historic snowpack in the Sierra Nevada was going to melt and create deadly conditions downstream.
As of midnight Friday, the Marin Municipal Water District counted 95.95 inches of rain in the Mount Tamalpais watershed for 2016-17.
… ” Read more from the Marin Independent Journal here: Marin officially puts drenching year in the record books Owens Valley: LA DWP won’t drill new wells in Bishop: “The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) today announced its decision to cancel plans to drill two new wells located in the West Bishop area.
“This is a huge deal,” said John Fleck, director of the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program.

BLOG ROUND-UP: Bloggers comment on the Water Fix; Reform before the next drought; Groundwater extraction oversight; Improving hatchery survival; Climate change; Public drinking fountains; and more ….
… ” Read more from the H2Outlook blog here: Water Fix Workshops, Part 1: The project More on the tunnels JPA: Alex Breitler writes, “The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California today released the first of three “white papers” on the Delta tunnels, which are supposed to inform MWD board members as the district moves toward a September vote on the project.
… ” Read more from Alex Breitler’s blog here: More on the tunnels JPA Biological Opinion for Delta Tunnels a Milestone?
“Not so fast,” say Delta protection advocates: Restore the Delta writes, “Yesterday, Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District issued a statement celebrating the federal biological opinions for CA WaterFix as “an important milestone” that brings the project one step closer to completion.
“In essence, they’re asking contractors to commit to paying for construction without knowing how the projects will be operated and how much water can be exported.” … ” Read more from Restore the Delta here: Biological Opinion for Delta Tunnels a Milestone?
… ” Read more from the California Fisheries Blog here: Improving hatchery salmon survival Managing climate: We think the real threat to our state are the humans who manage our water resources: Families Protecting the Valley writes, “It seems to us that climate change is a nice convenient answer to all the problems California water bureaucrats encounter.
Instead of dealing with it, we worry about future climate change.
… ” Read more from the Northern California Water Association here: The state of Sacramento Valley water San Joaquin Valley water supplies: Unavoidable variability and uncertainty: Brad Arnold, Alvar Escriva-Bou, and Jay Lund write: “Passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) and the recent drought have brought attention to chronic shortages of water in the San Joaquin Valley.
Here we examine long-term balances for San Joaquin Valley’s water supplies and demands that we discussed in a prior blog post.
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CHILIMO, Ethiopia (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Ethiopia is enlisting the cooperation of people in and around its forests to manage woodland better, hoping to protect the country from the effects of climate change while boosting development prospects for its population of 100 million.
Its Climate Resilient Green Economy strategy aims to meet half of its target reduction in carbon emissions by adding 5 million hectares (12.4 million acres) of forests by 2020 – just three years from now – and restoring 22 million hectares of degraded landscapes by 2030.
Under the program, local community cooperatives have been given the right to protect and manage the forest, which faces encroaching population pressure and illegal logging, and decide on how to use the benefits accrued from it.
He said the community’s decision to help preserve the Chilimo reserve is the result of seeing the problems other communities have faced after destroying their forests.
Stephen Danyo, an expert in natural resources management with the World Bank’s Ethiopia office, said the forestry management scheme aims not just to secure incomes for local communities but to protect water resources for downstream communities as well.
Moges said protecting forests would also help ensure more stable harvests by protecting water supplies – a major concern in a country where the government says 7.8 million Ethiopians face food shortages as a result of climate change-related drought and land degradation.
Woldegiorgis, on the other hand, thinks tougher punishments for illegal loggers in the Chilimo Forest Reserve are needed.
Moges also thinks some of Ethiopia’s rural population needs to move to its cities to better protect forests and other land as the country’s population expands.
More than 80 percent of the country’s population lives in rural areas, adding to the pressure on forests, he said.
“A prosperous Ethiopia is one that protects its forest resources.

Wheat prices sky high during drought.
But, if you managed to sit on some wheat from last year’s crop you’ll be in line for a big pay day.
"You’re seeing significant gains in Minneapolis that equates to somewhere to $2 a bushel in the past couple months," said Eric Basnette, Grain Merchandiser.
Some think it could go even higher.
"I think it’s very possible we’re going to see the Minneapolis wheat board go into the $9, $10 area," said Eugene Graner, Heartland Investors.
Future supply is in serious danger because of the drought conditions across the state, which may get worse before they get better.
"Near term in the next couple of weeks things actually look to trend on the dryer side but they also look to trend on the warmer side which could also be impacting soil moisture content as well as increasing that fire danger as well," said Curt Olson, KFYR-TV Meteorologist.
Which means if you’re sitting on some of last year’s wheat, you could be in line for a windfall.
"A lot of these farmers are just waiting to see where this tops at if there is a top, and then hopefully sell at that point.
We literally are in uncharted territory," said Basnette.

Drier than average June puts state back into drought conditions.
"According to preliminary data from the Oklahoma Mesonet, the month finished with a statewide average of 2.97 inches, 1.55 inches below normal to rank as the 43nd driest June since records began in 1895," according to a release from the Oklahoma Climatological Survey.
"Central Oklahoma’s average of 1.94 inches fell nearly 3 inches below normal to rank as that region’s 18th driest June.
Payne County is currently in low fire danger according to the Oklahoma Mesonet, and Stillwater received 3.45 inches of rainfall in the past 30 days according to records.
The report continues, "Mother Nature made up for the disappointing rain totals by offering extended breaks from the summer heat.
Summer still peeked through at times, of course.
The Mesonet recorded at least one triple-digit temperature on 14 of the 30 days in June, and heat index values soared as high as 112 degrees on a couple of occasions.
"The bursts of summer heat, combined with strong winds and lack of rainfall, created a “flash drought” scenario – a relatively rapid return to drought compared to the normal long-term development of the hazard.
Per the U.S. Drought Monitor, the state progressed from no drought at the beginning of the month to 13 percent on June’s final report.
The Climate Prediction Center’s July temperature outlook features increased chances of above-normal temperatures "over the western two-thirds of the state, but no clear indication for the eastern third."