On this date in 1930, amid a blistering heat wave in the D.C. area, one of the worst droughts ever observed in the eastern United States was near its peak. “There have been serious droughts before, but none in the history of the Weather Bureau has been so prolonged as that through which most of the country east of the Rockies is now passing,” the New York Times wrote on Aug. 10. “Hundreds of millions of dollars in crops have been destroyed and those crops cannot be reclaimed. Everywhere rivers, creeks and brooks are dried up or running extremely low.”
An article from LoudounHistory.org said the Potomac, Rapidan and Rappahannock rivers were reduced “to a series of fetid puddles.”
The drought peaked in the Mid-Atlantic between July 19 and Aug. 10, climatologist Patrick J. Michaels said in a column in The Washington Post in 2002. At the same time, temperatures soared, reaching the triple digits a record 11 times in D.C. Aug. 9 was one of those days, with a high of 102 — and no rain.
“Rainfall was virtually nonexistent that summer,” Michaels wrote. “Except for a few places that received a lucky thunderstorm, much of the Mid-Atlantic saw less than an inch between June 20 and the end of August, or about 10 percent of normal rainfall.”
Here are other notables from this day:
- Average high: 89
- Average low: 72
- Record high: 102 (1930)
- Record low: 57 (1989)
- Record rainfall: 2.71 inches (1905)
