" the river functions more like a fourteen-hundred-mile-long canal. The legal right to use every gallon is owned or claimed by someone—in fact, more than every gallon, since theoretical rights to the Colorado’s flow, known to water lawyers as “paper water,” greatly exceed its actual flow, known as “wet water.” That imbalance has been exacerbated by the drought in the western United States, which began just before the turn of the millennium, but even if the drought ended tomorrow, problems would remain. "

― , Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River