How desperate was the city to replenish its rapidly dwindling water supply during the 1950s drought? The council hired a rainmaker.
The decision to pay $35,000 to a Denver company headed by renowned meteorologist Irving Krick in 1952 remains, if not controversial, at least surprising, even 50 years later. Dallas officials, after all, aren’t supposed to throw around money like that.
But the city was desperate, and Krick was the leading weather guru of his day. He had been the forecaster who gave Dwight Eisenhower the okay to launch D-Day when every other Allied weatherman had predicted rain over the Norman coast. And he had had some success bringing rain to other drought-stricken parts of the country.
Krick’s weapon was cloud-seeding, in which generators fogged clouds over the city’s water supply — Lake Dallas and the like — with silver iodide crystals. Theoretically, the crystals would increase the moisture in the clouds and produce rain.
Krick had little success, although not necessarily because cloud seeding was the wrong approach. The drought was so severe that few clouds ever appeared during the six months Krick was on the job.
