By JIM BUTLER
A cold wind blows this week but Journal readers have not forgotten the travails of extended heat and drought this year.
That weather extreme is the top Rapides story of the year, according to those ranking a list of 10 selections.
Forty percent favored the weather calamity as Number 1. Finishing second was surging enrollment at LSU at Alexandria (30 percent).
Alexandria’s utility billing recovery, book policy at the parish library and crime/punishment were each favored by 10 percent of the vote.
Four other possibilities received no top story nods. They were legislative election results, development in Pineville and at England Airpark, the Renaissance tax rejection and creation of the Bolton High Academy.
After a wetter, cooler Spring, leaving corn fields and vegetable gardens in a moldy mess, a drying out began.
And by mid-May the weather gurus were warning of ominous patterns over the horizon. For the most part they were right.
The parish started June with a 92-degree day and closed it with 98. It rained twice – on June 4 and 21, NOAA reports.
By then farmers were thinking replanting, again, or let it go. Irrigation pumps were primed, divining rods dusted off.
About four inches of rain over July’s first two weeks offered false hope. No more fell that month.
On July 21, the mercury hit 101, passing the century mark for the first time of the summer. It wasn’t the last.
Temps topped 100 the last six days of July.
Then came August – 100 degrees or more the first through the 15th, including 107 on the 14th; then the same story the 17th-27th, with a peak of 109 on the 24th.
The average temperature for the month (the reading at any given moment day or night) was a sweltering 89.66 degrees.
Meanwhile August official rainfall was .03 of an inch.
September-November continued the pattern. Less than five inches of rain fell in that period.
The economic impact of the weather is still being calculated.
The LSUA enrollment this fall was 5,104, a 700-student increase from 2022.
The school, opened in 1960, partnered this year with LSU Health Services Center in expanding course offerings.