The Charles River in MassachusettsPhotographer: Brian K. Sullivan/Bloomberg It’s barely September, but crops are withering and brown leaves carpet the ground. Forests are bursting into flames. An iconic river is, in some places, little more than a mud-choked stream. This isn’t the US West, where a historic megadrought is threatening supplies of food, drinking water and hydropower. It’s the Northeast — a region where, for most people, the parched conditions are more nuisance than crisis. But for farmers from New York to Maine, the dry weather has been nothing short of disastrous, and rainfall this week provided little relief. In Rhode Island, the drought’s impact on some crops could last well into next year, according to the state’s Department of Environmental Management. In Massachusetts, the drought in late August was the most severe for that time of year in US government data going back to 2000. The Northeast’s plight […]