HOUSTON (AP) — Large areas of Texas have fallen into severe drought as a typically wet season remains relatively dry.
The Texas Water Development Board says Tuesday that extreme-to-exceptional conditions have spread to a quarter of the state based on the information released by the National Drought Mitigation Center. That is almost double the area that faced those conditions last week.
Nearly the entire Texas Panhandle and a swathe of Central Texas are in extreme drought. Pockets of the Panhandle and a chunk of north-central Texas register as “exceptional,” the worst level of drought recorded by the center.
Other areas are either abnormally dry or in a lower-level of drought.
Spring is normally a wet season in chunks of Texas, but much of the state has so far seen little rainfall.