THE continuing dry weather across the Orange region in recent months is moving well beyond the realms of historical curiosity to creating genuine concerns.
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The few drops that fell on the windscreen on the way to work on Friday morning barely made a mark on the region’s rain gauges.
According to weatherzone.com.au, those few spots and specks take the total rainfall for July to a paltry 8.2 millimetres.
That comes on top of a near-record June low of just 4 millimetres, making a total of 12.2 millimetres for the whole of winter so far.
To put those numbers into even starker perspective, the long-term average for June in Bathurst is 87.9 millimetres and the July average is 83.4 miilimetres.
And this year’s long dry comes after one of the wettest winters on record in 2016 when an incredible 219 millimetres of rain fell in June and 148.2 millimetres in July – including a couple of days where more than 35 millimetres was recorded.
The dire conditions have local producers looking nervously to the season ahead and already there have been reports of farmers ploughing in crops that had been sowed around May – gambling on the “late break” that never came.
Some producers have also been forced to start hand-feeding stock and some wonder if we are heading back to the bad old days of the early 2000s drought.
It’s a terrible thought.
Now we have had the Rural Fire Service add its concerns to the mix.
In most years, late July would be no time to be seriously thinking about the threat of bushfires – but this is not most years.
The dry conditions have the RFS worried about the bushfire season ahead, saying it would be much worse than last year.
If we’re seeing this in July, who knows what January and February might hold?
Even with last year’s deluge of winter rain, the Central West endured some of its worst bushfires in living memory, most notably the catastrophic Sir Ivan blaze which ravaged the farming land around the Dunedoo and Mudgee region.
Rarely has Dorothea Mackellar’s “droughts and flooding rains” been more apt than across the Central West in the past year.
It’s hard to believe to incredible change in just 12 months, but it’s a stark reminder of the incredibly harsh land we live in.
We all have our fingers crossed for some meaningful rain soon.
