LA turns to rainmakers as drought starts to bite hard
Pastor Dale Morgan
*LA turns to rainmakers as drought starts to bite hard*
* Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
* The Guardian,
* Wednesday June 18 2008
Eight hundred thousand dollars should buy a lot of water. But in Los
Angeles county, where a recently declared drought is starting to bite,
politicians plan to spend that much firing silver iodide particles into
the sky in the hope of boosting rainfall by as much as 15%.
"There are no assurances or guarantees that it will produce anything,"
Richard Hansen, general manager of Three Valleys municipal water
district told the Associated Press. "But it doesn't hurt to try."
Los Angeles engaged in cloud-seeding from the 1950s to the 1990s, when
the practice was suspended because of concerns that it could trigger
landslides.
But other areas, including nearby Santa Barbara, have continued to use
the method, typically employing aircraft or ground-based generators to
spray silver iodide above mountains.
Los Angeles county plans to place generators along the foothills of the
San Gabriel mountains, north of the city. The generators will use
propane burners to spray the particles into the air, where the silver
iodide will interact with clouds to create additional ice crystals. The
exercise will take place during the winter rains, to minimise risk of
fire and because there need to be natural clouds.
A study by the National Academy of Sciences released in 2003 found no
evidence that cloud-seeding worked, although experts acknowledge it is
difficult to gauge whether a cloud is producing more rain than it might
normally do.
"It's something that I wish there were more good hard research on,"
Maury Roos, California's chief hydrologist told the Los Angeles Times.
"I think there's something to it. The question is, how much, versus how
much is it going to cost?"
Should the practice catch on, it will mark a return to one of southern
California's obsessions with modifying nature and the exploits of
Hatfield the Rainmaker.
Practising his craft in the early years of the 20th century, Charles
Mallory Hatfield would place "evaporating tanks" filled with chemicals
in drought-affected areas. His most notable claim was to coax 16 inches
of rain (about 41cm) in two days from the skies over San Diego in 1916.
The city, however, refused to pay Hatfield, declaring: "We told you
merely to fill the reservoir - not to flood the community."