Cities will be up the river without a ladle.

• Author: Martin, Edward

Parting the water may have been easy for Moses, but parting with it can be hard for anyone else. A preacher testifying at a hearing in Valdese on a proposal to divert 22 million gallons a day from the Catawba River to Concord and Kannapolis asked, "What would Jesus do?" He was booed off the stage.

Interbasin transfers are when water is taken from one river system, used, treated and then deposited into another, usually because it's closer. Places that use the river from which the water is taken usually oppose it. A decade ago, North Carolina lost a legal battle to keep Virginia Beach, Va., from taking 45 million gallons a day from Lake Gaston north of Raleigh.

Hearings on the Catawba proposal have attracted as many as 700 shouting, sign-wielding Tar Heel opponents, not to mention protests from some South Carolinians, who accuse North Carolina of poaching this time. "It's as if we have now turned to South Carolina and said, 'Do unto others as we were done unto," says Donna Lisen-by, executive director of Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the Catawba in both states. It opposes the transfers.

The Cabarrus County towns want to take water from the Catawba, which flows west of Charlotte, then south through Rock Hill, S.C., toward Columbia. The water would be discharged east into the Pee...