WAUKESHA, Wis. -- Lake Michigan is just 15 miles from this city of 70,000 in the Milwaukee suburbs. But these days it seems like a gigantic, shimmering mirage, tantalizingly out of reach.
The aquifer that has provided most of Waukesha's drinking water for a century has dropped so far that what's left has unhealthy levels of radium and salt. The city would like to draw from the Great Lakes, just as more than 40 million people in eight states and two Canadian provinces do every day.
Though the lakes hold one-fifth of all the fresh water on earth, the states with rights to it have guarded them jealously and aren't in a generous mood after a decade of abnormally low levels. Their permission is required to tap in from outside the watershed, and approval for Waukesha -- which lies barely on the wrong side of the line -- is far from certain.
A recent report identified at least seven other cities in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio that are in the same predicament.
What separates the haves from the have-nots is a watershed boundary that encircles the lakes, edging almost to their shores in some places and more than 100 miles away in others.