Residents
of the arid West have always scrapped over water. But years of
persistent drought are now intensifying those struggles, and the
explosive growth — and thirst — of Western cities and suburbs is raising
their stakes to an entirely new level.
In
southern Texas, along the Gulf coast southwest of Houston, the state
has cut off deliveries of river water to rice farmers for three years to
sustain reservoirs that supply booming Austin, about 100 miles
upstream. In Nevada, a coalition ranging from environmentalists to the
Utah League of Women Voters filed federal lawsuits last month seeking to
block a pipeline that would supply Las Vegas with groundwater from an
aquifer straddling the Nevada-Utah border.
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