For the first time in 2023, my dock has run aground. This is the scene that greeted me Saturday morning. The Mississippi River was flowing at about 8.4 feet below zero on the Memphis gauge--nearly five feet lower than the previous Saturday when I had last made it down to the riverfront. By yesterday afternoon the level had dropped to 9.7 feet below zero.
Last year the river dropped to the lowest Memphis gauge reading ever recorded: -10.8 feet. That was late last October; now it's just early September, but here we are flirting with such levels once more. Unless some rain falls higher in the watershed soon, I expect we'll start to see some reporting in the national news about the extreme drought conditions in the lower Mississippi basin.
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