Reply #69: The Great Lakes area has its own problems.

[Are_grits_groceries]

The Great Lakes Water Wars
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The greatest fear of the Great Lakes’ terrestrial neighbors is that their waters will be stolen outright, diverted to irrigate golf courses in Las Vegas, fill swimming pools in Phoenix, and supply condos in San Diego. That’s not sheer paranoia. The driest parts of the nation are also the fastest-growing. And over the years a number of elaborate proposals have been floated to get the Great Lakes flowing southwest.

<snip>
Those episodes and others confirmed what was already pretty obvious: to the people in the eight states and two Canadian provinces that border the Great Lakes, the smallest diversion of water outside the watershed is to be vigilantly avoided. Even a trickle, they fear, would eventually open the floodgates of diversion and suck the lakes dry. Having seen the damage wreaked by mismanagement, they are not about to submit their lakes to the same fate as that of Russia’s great Aral Sea.
<snip>
But water-management difficulties stem not merely from outside threats, but also from the challenge of defining and reconciling the often clashing interests of multiple governments, residents, and industrial communities in the waters they each claim but must share. The Great Lakes drainage does not respect political boundaries.

Case in point: Waukesha, Wisconsin, a western neighbor and now suburb of Milwaukee, wants to replace its current system of wells with a connection to the bigger city’s water mains, which draw from Lake Michigan. The proposal looks like a straightforward matter of plumbing. Yet Waukesha’s effluent goes into the nearby Fox River, which drains into the Mississippi—not into the Great Lakes—so even the simple joining of pipes represents a diversion with international repercussions.

http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/251123/the-great-lakes-water-wars

Diversion is something that may not happen. However, as the author points out, Waukesha is a local problem.