Source: Had a friend in college that interned for a group of attorneys in Western, CO whose entire practice was around water access rights.
She explained to me some of the ridiculous things that neighbors requiring common water access could do to each other - based purely on who was using the water first.
https://extension.unr.edu/publication.aspx?PubID=3750 has more details.
Either ‘first user wins’, like here, or ‘all users get allotment’ - in which case you can be screwed by someone building a new subdivision, or ‘gov’t entity allocates’ in which case corruption/payoffs become the norm, etc, etc.
At least it’s better than ‘shoot anyone using your well without permission’ like used to be the middle eastern standard eh?
Of course this ignored the people who were already living there, but they had the wrong skin color and religion.
And straight up lies. The Colorado water compact “average flow” was known to be nonsense when it was established, but politicians ignored the engineers’ estimates of long-term averages which were significantly lower than the figure the compact is based on.
The synopsis is that in the near-future water in the west is SCARCE and there are dueling factions (NGOs, state governments, criminals) fighting legally and physically over water, including digging through old libraries and government offices for water right contracts that may be older than the known ones to usurp the standing owner's right.