The cross-border system fed from the Elan Valley in the UK is like this, Wales is famously very rainy due to its hills and the Victorians exploited this by damming the Elan Valley and gravity-feeding the water from the Cambrian Mountains all the way to Birmingham which was a rapidly growing industrial centre. There's no pumps, it was all calculated to drop 170 feet over 73 miles!

It's a really stunning place to visit as well, mid Wales in general is so pretty and the dams themselves are ornamented in a way nobody would bother with today. Of course the Victorians got away with things that would be unthinkable now, when Liverpool did the same approach of flooding Welsh valleys to water English cities in the mid 20th century it was very controversial because the scheme flooded a majority Welsh-speaking village and the language was in a fairly steep decline then; nowadays there's a lot more protections for Welsh.

our facility builds features to only 25 year floods, and that appears to be typical in the US.