Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
You'd make it about a day here in CO before the guy downstream who (paid for) the water you stole comes "visiting".
Or...worse....the "ditch rider" comes for a "visit". You can talk all big and stuff all you want...but he will simply take your rainwater barrel and toss it in his truck....or drive across your illegally irrigated lawn/garden to bulldoze the pond you illegally built to water it all with...NO permission needed (he has trespass rights and your rights end at the water). Fook with him and the State will shut yer azz down...pronto...along with the levying of some hefty fines. The development upstream from me THOUGHT they could ALL use the water that flowed in the ditch....so much so that most of them dammed it up and had swimming docks/diving boards/etc. in their private (illegal) ponds.
Last Summer the ditch rider told me he spent most of the Summer on a bulldozer on most every property along the ditch...filling in those ponds. Now...all of those folks are on the radar and ANY use of the water will get them a $500 a DAY fine. ANY use.
Like you and many others who don't know about Water rights.....they falsely believed that "Resources that make their way to your property, are your property." Dunno how it is in incredibly wet Virginia....but here in CO....your attitude couldn't be more wrong/in the wrong.
In Colorado...water and cows rule....and neither are yours to do what you please with simply because they end up on property you own. Both cows and water have more legal protection than YOU or your property will ever have and your "rights" end where their rights begin.
Rainbow - Like they said water is for fighting, whiskey is for drinking... at least in the areas with limited water resources.
And I would not choose to live in an Area where I couldn't use rainwater... Luckily there are a whole lot of areas in the US where this isn't an issue. I won't even postulate as to what I would or wouldn't do, because I would never voluntarily be in that position.
To people that live in areas that have issues with too much water, it shocks the conscious that there are areas where you can't touch it. As I said in a much earlier post - different conditions in different areas mean different rules/laws to follow...
Money is just paper and ink. It doesn't give anyone anymore right to the rain than anyone else. The water rights system in the west is not working at all. And as the unusually wet period of the last couple centuries ends and things get more dry, the whole thing is going to fall apart. Big cities simply don't belong in arid areas.
It is difficult for most Easterners to grasp the idea of owning water. Eastern Water law is based on passing any water used from a river on downstream "unchanged in quantity and quality". This has been abused, the quality part mostly, in the past by many industries and now a few water miners selling the stuff in plastic bottles.
Right now we have about two feet of solid water still on the lawns of our condominium property. We also have a considerable amount of water under the ice covering our ponds. We supply our water needs with deep wells drilled into cracked bedrock. We have a LOT of water around. We have so much water we cannot conceive of owning it. We just use it then clean it up and send it back to the ground or rivers. We have so much most of us cannot even conceive of dry.
This is why many Easterners are shocked by the notion of not being able to keep the water that falls onto your property. After all there is more than enough to go around, isn't there?
If Colorado ONLY had to take care of it's own water usage needs....we'd never have an issue here with water and we could use it and abuse it and call it ours...as others in wetter climes do...simply because it was located on our property.
But that isn't the case. CO sends water...via Water Rights....to AZ/NM/CA/KS/OK and more. If it blows folks away in the East to hear about water allotments/a water rights system in a certain state...how about pondering that the water (like the water in the creek 20 ft out my door) is "owned"....not by the good people in COLORADO where it originates....but by some farmer in KANSAS or OKLAHOMA.... or Arizona or California?
I don't like the system either...but it has been in place since the late 1800's here. (not Obama's fault...LOL) Like many, we work around it all via buying property with a (domestic) well right that allows us to use the groundwater rather than surface water. With that right we can irrigate our garden/water the trees we've planted/etc.
I wonder what the laws are on this in Florida....we get so much rain here that I never have to fill my pool, I actually have to drain it multiple times a week in the summer. Guess I owe the State a lot of money for using their water.
There is some noise that the Colorado ban on rain barrels might be overturned. That would make some suburban gardeners, including me, very happy. It's not because I can't afford to irrigate my raised beds; it's because rain water is just better for gardening than the water that comes out of the tap.
I will admit to being a bit perplexed by this thread and the talk of laws and taxes and legalities of collecting rain water. I found the answer. I am in the Seattle area. I see that folks are talking about SoCal and NM in their posts. We don't have much issue with water shortages here...our 2500 gallon tank is already 1/2 full since we installed it last weekend. I cannot imagine how it is in an area where water is such a commodity. I was confused because I kept seeing folks talk about the west and the Western Water Law. I'm in the west...as west as you can go without hitting salt water, but the water issues aren't something we worry about.
It's only been legal to collect rain water in WA since 2009. I wasn't aware of this until I started looking into why the previous owner plumbed city water into a decorative pond in our front yard. It seemed to me that our house has too much rain water as is, so why would there be a need to run additional piping to small pond? It wasn't legal to collect rain water to fill the pond at the time it was built. Now I have a bunch of plumbing to dig out of the front yard.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
