THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And the city of Waukesha, Wisconsin is experiencing the agony of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge was writing about as the contamination of their aquifer requires it to get a new drinking water source, but Lake Michigan a mere 17 miles away is out of bounds to them.

Waukesha has run smack into a landmark 2008 compact that prohibits large amounts of water from the five Great Lakes from being pumped, trucked, shipped or otherwise moved beyond the system’s natural basin without approval from the governors of each of the eight states that touch a lake. (Unless it is in a product like beer or soft drinks.) Waukesha, despite being so close to Lake Michigan, is about a mile and a half outside the lake’s natural basin.

In a wetter era, the city’s plan to build a $200 million pipeline to tap into Lake Michigan might have fallen on more sympathetic ears. But it faces a daunting obstacle now: historic drought in the West, which has made officials in the Midwest more protective than ever of their increasingly valuable resource.

“Obviously I have concerns about the usage of the Great Lakes in any capacity,” Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan said in an interview, adding that he was closely watching the Wisconsin city’s request and had yet to decide how he would vote. A single governor can veto a diversion of water.

“To some degree it’s like, where do you draw the line?” Mr. Snyder said. “It shouldn’t be done just as an ad hoc thing or a political thing. It should be based on sound science and good economics and what’s best for the long term. The Great Lakes are one of the world’s most precious assets.”

If national drought conditions and the economic and political pressures that follow worsen over time, some Midwestern water experts fear that the lakes’ existing protections might ultimately weaken. Waukesha’s quest for water — the first proposal for such a diversion outside the Great Lakes basin in years — is seen by some as a first major test of the compact, its strength and its limits.

Obviously the solution is to have Nestle build a water bottling plant that draws from the lake and sell all the output, at a profit, to the city.