The North Carolina Drought Management Advisory Council (DMAC) has classified all or part of 99 counties as in moderate drought or abnormally dry, with high temperatures and low precipitation driving the rapid deterioration of conditions across the state. 

For the first time since August, North Carolina is now drought-free. Some areas of Cherokee, Clay, Graham, Macon and Dare counties remain abnormally dry, but the remaining 95 counties are now at or above normal moisture levels. 

Severe drought is gone from North Carolina and moderate drought barely holding on after an extraordinarily rainy first half of January. 

While some may have preferred a white Christmas, the rain that covered the region instead has proven the better Christmas gift for a region in continued drought. 

The N.C. State Climate Office has launched a year-in-review tool that gives a review of trends and records at weather stations across the state. 

Drought conditions are the best they’ve been in a month, according to the latest map from the Drought Management Advisory Council, with recent rains wiping out the extreme drought conditions that had affected 13 western counties. 

Drought is strengthening in southwestern North Carolina, with 14 counties now in moderate drought and an additional 58 labeled abnormally dry.

A month of rain capped off by the arrival of Tropical Storm Alberto has caused massive flooding, landslides and loss of life in North Carolina’s western region, but the mountains west of Asheville were mostly able to escape the devastation experienced in Polk, McDowell, Avery and Buncombe counties. 

“I think everyone’s optimistic that we dodged a bullet to have got 20 inches of rain in two weeks and not gotten any more extensive flooding than what we had,” said Joe Deal, agriculture extension agent for Macon County Cooperative Extension.

When rains finally quelled the flames of 2016’s historic fall fire season, firefighters breathed sighs of relief and mountain residents rejoiced in the newly smokeless air, but land managers were already looking ahead to springtime, when wildfires are typically even more severe and damaging than in the fall. 

At the time, the region was plunged in the most severe drought designation possible — even the days of steady rain that ended the fire season made barely a dent in it — and long-term forecasts were calling for a dry future.

Dowdy Bradley is 68 years old, and for nearly all of those years he’s been involved in some kind of farming, staying with the land through drought and flood, surplus and scarcity. The drought of 2016, however, has been the worst, hands-down — for him and for growers throughout the region. 

“This has been some of the hottest, driest weather I’ve seen, “ Bradley said. “I was worried about the water because it was already getting low. A couple pastures just dried up.”