And in Guyana and Suriname, coastal farmers irrigating with water from river estuaries have had to stop: because of the rivers' weak flow, it was sea-water.
Mr Simplot himself, an avowed lover of skiing, duck shooting and the great outdoors, was attacked in the 1970s for his support for new coal-fired electricity plants along the Snake river and for a scheme to generate hydro-power by diverting water from another river into a vast underground tube.
But they said water from the river was safe, with water quality meeting government-set standards.
The Environment Agency is already investigating how water from the river Clwyd breached flood defences built on the Glasdir site.
Linton was among the group kayaking with me, and he explained that Los Angeles gets some of its usable water from the river, and has for years.
Mr Mead, senior technical director for international consultants WSP Development and Transportation, said more water from the River Trent needed to be brought down to East Anglia.
In San Joaquin they use water from the river to irrigate the fields, load it with chemicals known to cause cancer, and then return it to the river.
They insisted that water from the river was safe.
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Transporting that food and medicine up into the hills will now prove even more challenging. (On Friday Indonesian troops stopped an aid convoy on the outskirts of Dili and seized two trucks laden with rice.) "The only thing we have a lot of is water from the river, " says John da Costa Freitas, a refugee.
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Already in the planning stages: a 37-km tunnel to channel water from the Benus river in water-rich Pahang state to drought-stricken Selangor state, and a pipe to link the Gombak river in KL to the Wangsa Maju water treatment plant.
Water from the swollen River Exe has washed away the ground from underneath some of the nearby track, buckling rails and making the area unstable.
The Jubilee River, a flood relief channel which diverts flood water away from the River Thames, will protect up to 3, 300 properties in the area.
The industry uses regulated amounts of water from the Athabasca River to separate bitumen from the sand.
The city imports 90 percent of its water from the Colorado River and the state water project.
New York City gets roughly half its water from the Delaware River Basin, a key area for hydraulic fracturing.
Icy water from a nearby river then cools the gas back to liquid form, to start the cycle again.
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These plants need the fresh water flow from the river for cooling, processing, and to ship their product out to the Gulf.
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Some engineers have theorized that removing too much debris from the basement would compromise the wall's support and allow water from the Hudson River to rush in.
And besides, they say, the water from the Colorado River -- the city's main supply -- already has to be treated to remove all types of pollution.
The diversion project a massive government undertaking will bring billions of gallons of water from the Yangtze River in the south northward to Beijing and other parts of northern China.
For most of the past century, agriculture has been the winner of the water wars, receiving the great bulk of water from the Colorado River and its two large reservoirs at Lake Mead and Lake Powell.
The project is intended to give the authorities the ability to draw water from the Colorado River for the Las Vegas area and guard against water quality issues that are associated with continually dropping lake levels.
Delhi draws three-quarters of its drinking water from the Yamuna river, into which the city dumps quantities of sewage, almost all of it untreated, to join a cocktail of farm chemicals and industrial effluents, including arsenic.
The storm also sent water from the Hudson River pouring into the unfinished World Trade Center site a factor that led FEMA to include the area around the complex in the zone considered likely to flood at least once a century.
An agreement in 1996 to share water from the Ganges river during the dry season has helped to improve relations with India, although Mr Vajpayee and Sheikh Hasina have so far been unable to agree to share water from another 50 rivers.
Asana, daughter of Ya Namina, my grandfather's senior wife: a magnificent hauteur flowed like river water from the mother's veins through the daughter's.
South East Water has applied to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to increase the amount of water it abstracts from the River Ouse.
In a letter to public attorneys general on Tuesday, the Arara tribe said that they were concerned about the quality of potable water derived from the Xingu River, an Amazon tributary.
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Villagers in Kunming in Yunnan are unconvinced by official assurances that water from a "milk river" is safe for drinking and farming, They say that it is getting harder to cultivate watermelons with foul-tasting water, Xinhua reports.
It also found no threat from the warmer water that is discharged back into the river or from any radioactive elements escaping from the plants into the Hudson.
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