Western water rights issues have never made a bit of sense to anyone not from the area. The movie Chinatown is a decent introduction to the process. They certainly had private armies in California, just read the labor history for the state. Every corrupt scheme ever devised in Boston, New York, and Chicago was taken to Los Angeles where they added Technicolor and Cinerama.

It’s still annoys the hell out of me that Federal tax payers subsidize the water used to grow rice in the desert.

The Los Angeles Aqueduct that turns the Owens Valley into a desert has always been covered other than the storage reservoirs. It’s actually a pair of aqueducts nowadays, one pulling from the original dams on the lower Owens Valley, the other pulling from wells and the upper Owens Valley. It still boggles my mind that Los Angeles managed to pull that one off, it must have required their own private army in the early days to protect the digs from irate farmers whose water was stolen.

We don’t have many reservoirs in the state, so there isn’t a start point for a pipeline.

Actually, at one reporting station on Eglin AFB to the East of me, they have reported receiving twice as much rain as we got. It definitely isn’t a good thing for tourism.