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Comment by daveslash | Hacker News Reader

The article opens with the story of a person collecting rain water. It should be worth pointing out: This story is in N̶e̶w̶ ̶M̶e̶x̶i̶c̶o̶ Arizona, but not all states permit collection of rainwater. For example, in Colorado each house is permitted up to 110 gallons of rain-water collection, but beyond that rainwater collection is illegal because the rainwater is considered property of the state, not of whose land it falls on.

Edit: Changed "New Mexico" to "Arizona" in my comment.

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110 gallons is such a small amount!

If you live in a dry part of the state and have 500 square feet of footprint, an average of 3000 gallons of water will come down just on your house every year. A more typical house with the 17 inch state average might have 10000 gallons land on it.

And then you could have a tank that stores only 1-3% of that? Jeez.

I understand not letting people capture water across an entire property. But is it too much to let me keep the water that falls directly on my bedroom and have a reserve for dry spells?

Colorado and Utah are last remainining states with such agressive policies. All other states allow the collection of water for domestic use. Additional permits are needed if you want to drink the water or use it commercially. Some states encourage it; I got a nice rebate on the money spent install my system in Arizona.

Much like rooves covered in solar cells, we should all have a well filled with rain water gathered from the property. Use it for landscape and everything thats not drinking.

What about leeching water out of the ground? One can cause floods and landslides doing that!

I think the story is in Arizona.

You are correct. My mistake. I've corrected my comment accordingly. Thank you.

There must be a story behind the rule. Was someone polluting rainwater instad of letting it flow? Filled up a container and let it evaporate?

It's to stop people from building giant reservoirs on their property, which can actually affect the local watershed. There was a case in Oregon about a decade ago where a man built three huge reservoirs on his property.

It's the difference between water rights in the dry West vs other parts of the country.

No one in wet Pennsylvania State would care, for example.

There is an entire set of legal doctrines and a body of law governing water and how it is allocated, etc.

I believe most of it stems from water diversion laws which were created during the gold rush. Miners started using hydraulic processes for getting gold which required large amounts of water. At the time, it was basically available on a first come first serve basis. That means if someone upstream from you opened a gold mine and diverted the water into their land instead of yours you had no recourse.

In some places, water collection bans were an anti-mosquito initiative.

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