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My ex wife & I had 8 acres in South Carolina & the city tried to tell us that once we had dug a well that we still NEEDED to have water though the city.
In the water-poor west, that is exactly the situation. You can own 20 acres of land, but if you don't have water rights you can't drill a well or even water your horses at the stream that crosses your property. You can plant crops but are forbidden from moving water from one part of your property to another to irrigate them, unless you purchase water and haul it in from elsewhere. Literally unthinkable in the water rich eastern half of the country.
Exactly this. It's not modern "big government" either so much as the governments from a century ago or more ago that came up with these laws because water has always been a scarce commodity in much of the West.
Here in the East, most of the time we have a water surplus that we store in the Great Lakes, the Finger Lakes, flood control reservoirs, etc.
We store our excess water in the Ohio River. But we don't need it, because our whole town gets plenty of water from the municpal water system which gets plenty of very clean water from underground, filtered by underground rock. And since we don't need the water we store in the Ohio River, we very generously let it go downstream, to donate it to downstream communities, if they want it, and even if they don't.
My ex wife & I had 8 acres in South Carolina & the city tried to tell us that once we had dug a well that we still NEEDED to have water though the city.
Were you getting other city services on the 8 acres like city sewer and electricity and police and fire protection?
Water is going to become scarcer and scarcer and there will be more and more laws about it. There just isn't enough to go around and it's not like you can do without it.
That's the issue, hotzcatz. When we were looking at moving to Vegas in 2006ish, Lake Meade was seriously low. CA and NV were going to be in trouble due to lack of water and water would become a new gold standard.
It's not surprising. It's not really new either. There have been drought controls in place, so the government was already in this mess. They allow businesses to use what they want and pollute underground water from superfund sites and fracking and many other things. But, it's the low-end consumer who gets hurt by all this as usual.
You're an east coaster, aren't you? Here is the west we have a saying, "Whiskey is for drinking, and water is for fighting." Water rights are fiercely held and fiercely defended. Filling a 55 gallon drum with rain water is not a big deal, but start holding thousands of gallons of runoff and somebody will pack a a few sticks of dynamite into your holding dam. States write water laws because it results in fewer corpses contaminating the runoff.
Yeah, until Google earth snaps a photo of it for the world to see. I agree about the law being stupid. What's next? The ground water that seeps into wells and springs isn't yours either? I'd better not give them any ideas.
Ah... that would be the "breath tax" for using up Oxygen...don't you know.
My only surprise is the Op is talking about rain water; not river; stream water. or under ground water.
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