Three days without water and you die. If it's hot and you're active you can cut that number in half or more. Cut off water and prevent proper sewage disposal, and hygene, and you create a potentialy massive public health problem - welcome back to the 19th century. Throw in no due process, no transparency, massive unemployment and poverty, and you've got Hunger Games 2014, with a little seige of Leningrad thrown in for heightened viewer interest and excitement. Then you have Chinese money waiting in the wings, with no doudt massive insider land/trading deals, and the deliberate giving up of soverignity to a potentially hostile state, along with the precedent setting nature of the whole exercise, and it is likely that this is what much of the rest of the USA has to look forward to in the not too distant future. Assuming that the water bills are really not getting paid, something that may or may not be accurate, the problem is not that the bills arn't getting paid, but that people do not have the funds to pay for basic necessities.