Posted on 01/02/2020 12:31:34 PM PST by Beave Meister
“Rainwater is known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm.”
Video taken down under order of the People’s Republic of California.
Water in the west has always been a hot-button issue. In fact Mark Twain once said that whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting. Since water rights are kind of like mining law, using the doctrine of first appropriation, whoever put the water to beneficial use first gets to claim first priority. So if an old timer dug ditches and diverted most of a stream to water his fields back in 1869, he owns the right to that amount of water. If someone did the same thing a hundred miles downstream but did it a year before this guy in 1868, then the 1869 farmer has to let enough water pass to supply the senior user’s traditional right. If it’s a dry year and there is not enough water for both, the 1869 farmer has to just watch the water flow by while his crops wither away. Fast forward to a hundred years later, a city buys the senior 1868 water right, and takes that same amount of water out of the creek upstream of both farmers, the city can suck out all the water, up to the amount that the 1868 right and even if they dry up the creek completely they can legally do so. The 1869 farmer just has to hope that there is more water in the creek. Cities like Denver even build pipelines, hundreds of miles long that can carry water from a river that used to flow to the Pacific Ocean and divert it to the other side of the Continental Divide. The same sort of thing applies to ground water that is pumped from wells. The end result is that many wells have meters on them. In the West, you can’t even claim the water that is on your own ground. It can be quite frustrating.
Interesting stuff—you may be fascinated by how we handle water shortages here.
I own a rural property with a deep pond. The property has long had an unwritten (not even hand-shake!) agreement with the local volunteer fire department that they can use a hydrant to take water from the pond as needed.
In addition there is a long (centuries old) tradition of sharing water from the pond with any local citizen who needs it.
Dry periods are rare here, but the local custom is that we share with our neighbors.
_Nothing_ is in writing—we are all very proud of that tradition—and there has never been a problem in the memory of the local elders.
Cheers!
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