In "Chinatown," Jack Nicholson's detective character snoops into skulduggery involving the Los Angeles water supply and, for his troubles, gets his nose slit by some goon with a pocket knife. (Roman Polanski arranged the scene so that he, both directing and acting, could do the honors.)

The availability of water in arid Southern California has always been a matter of big money and big business, colored by the occasional scandal. You can't grow a megalopolis if people don't have enough to drink. Those of us back here in greater metropolitan Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill and Lizard Lick used to comfort ourselves with the notion that water sufficiency wasn't something we needed to worry about. Oh, have we had a rude awakening -- even if, so far as we know, all local noses remain intact.

The abiding drought's repercussions include, in Raleigh and environs to the east, a rule against taking your little old garden hose and watering your little old plants, the ones that are still alive. I can't help wondering if people who use their hose to wash off their dirt-loving dog, as we used to do, also would be risking the watering-violation fine of a thousand smackers, first offense.

Falls Lake, Raleigh's reservoir, is not only pitifully depleted but, the experts say, in danger of tapping out entirely if dry weather persists through the summer. All that would be left would be the ghost of the Neuse River trickling through its vestigial channel amid flats of baked mud.

And then what? Will we have folks lined up at water tankers with their jugs? Will companies have to cut back production and put workers on furlough?

The scenarios are dire, although it's hard to imagine worse coming to worst. Would Raleigh be allowed to die of thirst, figuratively at least, while Jordan Lake to the west was still in relatively good shape, as it is today, and sending no water to the capital city? Someone would be laying some pipe.

That is, they'd be laying it unless someone else raised a stink -- which is absolutely what would happen.

This may not be Southern California, but neither is it a stranger to conflicts over water supplies. Jordan Lake does have a generous amount of water that hasn't been officially allocated, but several cities, including Cary, already rely on the lake. They won't be eager to see their growth prospects hindered by a Raleigh water raid (you can hear the rhetoric).

Downstream water users on the Cape Fear River, notably the city of Fayetteville, would have similar objections. And there are environmental concerns whenever water is pumped out of one river basin and discharged into another. Raleigh's treated wastewater ends up in the Neuse.

Many folks here in Droughtville wonder why they're being ordered to cut way, way back on water use while building permits keep being issued. It's a reasonable question, although economic impacts of water restrictions have to be considered. Putting growth on hold would mean lost business and lost jobs.

Still, the biggest water war yet fought in Eastern North Carolina found Tar Heels trying -- and failing -- to stop a raid by another city that had let development outpace its water supplies.

The city of Virginia Beach won permission to run a 76-mile pipeline to an arm of Lake Gaston that extends across the Virginia-North Carolina line. Lake Gaston, although shared, is largely a North Carolina resource, and the Roanoke River into which it eventually empties is a hugely important Tar Heel asset. But 10 years ago yesterday -- after 15 years of legal wrangling -- the U.S. Supreme Court finally gave Virginia Beach the go-ahead when it declined to hear a North Carolina appeal.

An N&O story had reported that Virginia Beach residents were looking forward to unrestricted lawn watering and long showers without pangs of guilt. So North Carolina had to give up 60 million gallons of water per day to let Virginians splurge with spigots wide open and keep on building houses as fast as they could nail them together? Where was Jack Nicholson when we needed him?

For all that, some North Carolinians may be remembering that he who laughs last, laughs best. It's a North Carolina consortium, including Raleigh, Durham and Cary, that is casting covetous eyes at Kerr Lake, Lake Gaston's large upstream neighbor.

Kerr lies mainly in Virginia but has an arm that extends south to the outskirts of Henderson, a mere 40 miles or so from Raleigh. The lake now is used chiefly for hydroelectric production at its dam. Could another big reservoir raid be justified, one that would further deplete water flows in the sensitive and vital Roanoke River basin? Well, maybe it all depends on how much more we want the Triangle to grow, and on how much it rains.