THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 4, 1996 TAG: 9608040058
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B7 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: By MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 82 lines
Don Baker is a Pasquotank County agricultural agent whose size-12 boots are tracking in so much mud from crop inspections these days that it looks like he's redigging the Dismal Swamp Canal.
``All that daily rain on top of waterlogged ground left by Hurricane Bertha is getting significant for our farmers now,'' Baker says.
``Nearly all of our money crops will be affected by the excess rain - particularly soybeans and cotton. And you never know for sure what corn is doing down there in the ground.
``No telling yet how much we can replant, but a lot of the first crops will die in the wet ground.''
All over northeastern North Carolina, county agents are gloomily estimating the crop damage they're sure they'll be hearing about when this year's strange weather finally settles down.
``Since Sunday in Pasquotank County alone, we've had between two inches and seven inches of rain, and there's hardly a farm in the county without standing water in the fields,'' Baker said Friday.
Nixonton at the southwest corner of Pasquotank County was one of several areas pelted with record amounts of rainfall during the week.
``We have reports of five and six inches of water coming down in one squall,'' Baker said.
Remarkably, the county agent added, the Newlands section of Pasquotank County was also flooded. Newlands Township at the north of Elizabeth City is between 18 and 20 feet above sea level - the highest land for miles around.
In Currituck County, extension agent Al Wood thinks there will be trouble with soybeans and cotton if the fields don't dry out soon.
``We have 3,000 acres of cotton in Currituck this year,'' Wood said, ``and some of the fields look like lakes.''
Even cantaloupe, a temperamental melon that stubbornly thrives in a small sandy patch around Rocky Hock on the Chowan River north of Edenton, may suffer from this year's unseasonal climate.
``If a cantaloupe gets too much rain it loses the intensity of it's flavor - it gets soft and bland,'' said Majorie Rayburn, a Chowan County extension agent.
Meanwhile, almost from the time that Hurricane Bertha hitched up her skirts and scuttled past the Outer Banks on July 11 and 12, a topsy-turvey weather pattern has prevailed along the mid-Atlantic Coast.
July is nominally dry in coastal Carolina, but with all that help from Bertha, it was wetter than usual. Then after Bertha's passage, a steady succession of frontal systems kept moisture moving down into eastern North Carolina.
Accurate rainfall measurements will have to await double-checking by Weather Service experts and Agriculture Department agents because of the spotty nature of the precipitation along the coast. During the many late-afternoon downpours, some communities got only a trace of rain while the neighboring landscape was flooded.
So, consider the stressful recent life of a veteran meteorologist named James Ireland at the new National Weather Service forecasting station on U.S. 70 at Newport, N.C., near Morehead City.
The Newport installation shares with another new U.S. Weather Service installation at Wakefield, Va., the job of predicting what the weather will do from the lower Chesapeake Bay down the coast to Cape Fear near Wilmington, N.C.
Ireland is an honored alumnus of the now-closed Cape Hatteras weather station at Buxton. Having seen the worst that an Outer Banks hurricane can dish out, nothing causes Ireland to flap very much.
However, last week Ireland seemed to answer every telephone call with a laconic ``Tuesday . . . maybe.''
Ireland explained that for nearly a week he's been saying ``Tuesday - next Tuesday'' to people who call up to find out when it will stop raining.
``We have a weather system that's parked on top of us,'' Ireland said. ``Every now and then a pulse of energy rolls along the front and stirs up more rain squalls and thunderstorms in eastern North Carolina.
``We're mostly on the wet side of this weather so you can't help but notice that it's downright persistent,'' Ireland explained, ``It just keeps pulsing along . . .''
The phone rang.
``Tuesday,'' said Ireland. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by DREW C. WILSON, The Virginian-Pilot
Floodwaters soak soybeans in Currituck County. Wet weather may hurt
crops such as soybeans and cotton.
KEYWORDS: WEATHER by CNB