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Water politics in the East is mostly “how do we get rid of all this water before we get flooded?”

Only mostly, but not always.

NYC and Philadelphia settled their first fight over the Delaware River watershed in the 1950s because of overuse. The settlement was modified in the 1960s when New Jersey complained that their rights had been ignored. I recall living in NJ around 1980 when a number of suburban communities were ordered to nearly drain their reservoirs to keep the salt line in the river below the Philadelphia intake pipes.

Georgia goes to court every several years to try to reverse a surveying error dating to 1818 because it would give them access to the Tennessee River. Georgia fairly desperately wants to divert water from the river into the Atlanta metro area. In dry years, the Tennessee is already over-committed.

Georgia, Florida, and Alabama have fought over the Apalachicola River (and some others) for decades because they’ve grossly over-committed to water diversions.

The Southern Company spent billions of dollars adding evaporative cooling systems to their thermal power plants in that area because there was insufficient water to use pass-through cooling any more. There’s at least one stretch of river that used to run backwards from time to time because of the power plant withdrawals.

Mostly but not always for the West as well. The Great Flood of 1862 was the result of ten feet of rain in 43 days in California, leaving several thousand square miles of the Central Valley submerged. The archeological record suggests such storms happen every 100-200 years. The next one will be interesting, as parts of the Central Valley are 25 feet lower than they were then due to subsidence after the underlying aquifers were nearly drained.