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ThatDamnedPanda -> RE: Government Outlaws Rainwater Collection (7/30/2010 9:11:20 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: thornhappy
Are they worried about aquifer charging? That's about the only reason I can see for the state to be interested in it, other than the structural issues pointed out above.
You're pretty close to the mark; but man, it's hard to have a rational and productive discussion about any topic that originates in one of these loony conspiracy sites, and in an article that ends with a frothmouthed rant about tyranny, and slavery, and citizens not having the right to breathe the air, and all the other customary conspiracy babble.
I don't know the exact origins of the Utah law regarding the storage of rainwater, but I think I can hazard a reasonably educated guess on the reasons most of the Western states have laws on the storage and diversion of water. And they're actually very good reasons, no matter what the conspiracy idiots on those websites think.
I'm guessing here, but I'm willing to bet that almost all of these laws are rooted in the water wars in the Colorado River Basin back around the turn of the 20th Century. As the American Southwest became increasingly agriculturalized, the water in the Colorado - which was essentially the only practical source for water in the entire Southwest - quickly became more precious than gold, and the states the Colorado drained and through which it flowed had to draw up an agreement on how much water each state was entitled to, and how much water each state had to leave in the river as it flowed out of their state and into the next. I think Mexico was even involved in the treaty, but I don't recall that for sure. There were similar interstate agreements made between states in the Pacific Northwest, like Idaho, Montana, Washington, and I think Oregon, but I think the Colorado River agreement was first, and certainly far more comprehensive and influential.
The result of these agreements was that the amount of water that individuals or corporations could divert from watersheds, and the amount of rainwater that they could store, had to be strictly regulated by each state in order to ensure that they were in compliance with the agreement. These were perfectly valid and sensible laws, not to mention extremely complicated and intricate - and oddly enough they had nothing to do with tyranny or slavery or legislating who can breathe and who can not. Or any of that other silly-assed conspiracy bullshit. It was just a way to make sure that an absolutely vital and very finite resource was fairly shared by everyone in the region, otherwise you could have had Colorado damming up the entire river and selling the water to Arizona.
The only thing that I'm curious about is where they got this "2500 gallon" figure. It's been many years since I read anything about this issue, but from what I recall, the storage limits on rainwater was often in the thousands of acre-feet per year - many times more than 2500 gallons. I don't know where that 2500 gallon thing is coming from, but that seems awfully small to me.
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