Why is it illegal to collect rainwater in some places? It doesn’t make sense to me
In: Economics
The tl;dr is that doing so can have a negative impact on people down river.
If you *didn’t* collect that rain water it would normally end up in a river when is then used by a bunch of other people. But if you collected all the rain that fell on your land those people might get basically zero water. If it’s extreme enough you could make an entire river dry up. Which is bad.
These laws are not really about us normal people that might collect a bit of rain from our roof. It’s for farmers with dozens of acres of ponds they can use to collect rain water.
Generally rainwater collection laws aren’t for regular folks with a rain barrel getting water off their roofs. They are for farmers who have 10 acre retention ponds that store huge amounts of water. That water is needed down river so you need to share and there are pretty strong agreements about who can take how much water out of a river to ensure everyone gets what they need and the colorado river doesn’t dry up before it gets to the gulf..
For places with limited water, it is a valuable resource that needs to be controlled and shared by all. If farms or people can catch and keep millions of gallons of rainwater, that’s water that isn’t flowing into the river that is the source of water for tens of millions of people. There’s tens of millions of people living in parts of the US where water is scarce resource. If even a fraction of those people collected rainwater, there wouldn’t be enough to fill the reservoirs to the point we need to ensure everyone has water on tap.
This makes total sense. Thanks!
If anyone needs some water come to Missouri. We can’t get rid of it fast enough. Keep all you want.
any water you collect is water that isn’t going into the river, which therefore isn’t feeding the local ecology and isn’t available for irrigation downstream.
As such the amount water per person available from the river is tightly regulated, farming communities have a “water master” who determines who gets what water when
Note that “personal use rainwater collection” is almost always legal – e.g. catching the water that comes out of your gutters from your normal roof in a rainbarrel – it’s setting up collection systems that catch hundreds or thousands of gallons of water from your 100 acre farm.
It’s actually brought up that for this reason rivers make TERRIBLE borders (and because rivers move occasionally), and that an “intelligent design” regional setups would place administrative borders on watersheds boundaries instead – with the borders at ridgetops so each river and all the water that flows into it makes a unique region.
A lot of the western U.S. has some variant of this, albeit with various exceptions for limited domestic use.
The underlying issue in this case is that water is a scarce resource in the region and so rights to water become very important.
Imagine, for example, you buy some land and then develop it, using irrigation from the river. Then later on someone buys a plot up river from you and dams it off. You’re now fucked and all the effort you put in to developing the land is gone. Sell up and move on. Or, in a less extreme but equally impactful manner – folks upstream later on start irrigating from the same river after you, leaving insufficient water for you. You’re still fucked because of these later actions.
This kind of scenario led to the evolution of water rights management in a lot of the western U.S. where the right to use water is held by the first person who started using it, as long as they continue to use it, to stop entire rivers being drained upstream and wiping out everyone downstream.
So if you’re in a river basin where these types of laws are in effect all the water that lands is part of the river basin, so even though it might fall on your land it’s not yours unless you have an existing claim to the water.
The primary target of these restrictions is industry and agriculture, where a large farm or industrial operation could easily use an obscene quantity of water. So you can’t just buy undeveloped land and then turn it into a farm that uses millions of gallons of water, because all the other water users lose out. You need to let the water get into the ground and from there the river. That said, as some major cities have grown the water use by residential properties is also becoming a non-trivial issue.
A few states have also relaxed their restrictions on small residential use, for example they’ve eased up on rain barrels figuring the small number of people who have a single 55 gallon drum aren’t a meaningful issue to regulate- but if a farm wants to build a million gallon cistern… that’s a different issue
The issue is with blocking the source for a river or other water source for a community, not the odd gallon or two being collected for personal use.
In general and most places, you can collect rainwater, but there may be limits or restrictions.
These limits/restrictions are in place to ensure there is still plenty of water flowing downstream to others who need it.
Some places require that the water-collection containers are closed to ensure the water barrels don’t become mosquito breeding grounds.
More info: https://www.pahomepage.com/news/is-it-legal-to-collect-rainwater-in-your-state/
Basically it’s not because of normal folks. Nearly every rule that seems outrageous is there because there’s someone who abused it so badly it had to be made law. There are farms and ranches with hundreds of thousands of acres that are able to channel all the rainwater into their own private retention reserves, and basically causing ecological destruction and devastation by doing so. So yeah we make a law, then normal people also get held to it.
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