Political waters

Large parts of California are like Israel, irrigated desert. Water here is a big issue. It was only after I lived in SF a while that I discovered that rainfall in San Francisco had very little impact on our water supply. We could be flooded here and still run out of water. We get 85% of it from Yosemite National Park, 165 miles away, from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir there, water coming from the Tuolomne River (it's pronounce Twolomy; like the second c in Connecticut, the n is silent) and, importantly, the snow melt. As in Rome and Constantinople, gravity drives the water down to us from the 3000 foot high Sierras to us, through aqueducts and tunnels, all of which cross the Hayward fault...