Collecting Rain in Colorado

Recently the Colorado state legislature overturned a law prohibiting land property owners from harvesting rain water. Kind of. Harvesting rain water is a process of collecting rain in barrels or tanks before it reaches the ground. This usually means a simple redirection of the flow of water from your rooftop’s gutters with a little piping. So, you’re catching and storing the rain that falls on your property, no big deal right? Apparently it is. For over a hundred years rain harvesting has been illegal in the state of Colorado (and apparently also Washington state and Utah). If you think this is ridiculous, so do I.

From what I gather, the reasons for this date back to the 1800’s when the wild west was being settled. Wealthy land owners were the first to lay claims to the land. Areas with the greatest access to water are usually the first pieces of land to be claimed because living near water meant easier money. The people living near the water were concerned that folks that didn’t live near the water would catch the rain and store it for themselves. If folks were storing it for themselves then water in the tributaries and rivers might run low and there are a lot of other states that use the water provided by the Colorado River. So laws were set up that would prevent that from happening.

Nowadays, the reasons to keep such a law have changed a little. Water is getting more and more scarce. If we don’t allow the rain to replenish the streams and aquifers (an underground stream of water), that might cut down on the amount of water that can be extracted and hurt someone else who needs access to the water. Water for someone that lives in a drought area would wind up being a lot more expensive because the actual reserves of water would be smaller. Since the laws were written in the 1800’s the “rights” to the water are given to those that are first in line to receive ownership (in some cases this means Native Americans since can lay the earliest claim to owning the water). Because that water would (or could) eventually end up watering someone’s lawn in San Diego, a southern California water company can claim that people who keep rain water are stealing from San Diego citizens. I suppose that since water has become such a precious resource, the Colorado government feels that it needs the ability to manage where and how the water is used.

Links: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104643521