You made some very good points my friend Believe it or not, that is the second time today I've gotten my math wrong.
agreed. The title itself makes it seem like he did something awful. and is strikingly like anti drug fear mongering media.
It varies by state, but YES you can build a dam and a reservoir on your own private property, my state with no permit. What you can NOT do is collect water that RUNS through your place to put it in that reservoir if you don't own the water rights to it. you'd have to fill it with ONLY rain water. This dude was DIVERTING water. It had nothing to do with "rain water". Our family farm has the #2 water right on the nearby river. It runs through our property. we own the dirt UNDER the river, but not the water itself. We're only entitled to 7 & 1/4 acre-feet of it. As long as the guy with the #1 right has his allotment, then EVERYONE between our farm and the head of the river MUST allow the remaining water to go downstream to our farm and can only take out their water IF and ONLY IF our 7 & 1/4 acre feet are present. If there isn't enough, we can take ALL of it and nobody else gets any. The "ditch riders" have the authority to ARREST people AT GUNPOINT if necessary to stop them from stealing OUR water. Why do we get the #2 right? Because the person who owned the deed to our land filed 2nd in line back in 1892. Usually irrigation water rights on a flowing source belong to the real estate itself, not the people holding the deed. We can't "give" our water to someone else unless we can take it out of the river on OUR headgate and then PUMP or PIPE it to someone else somehow, it MUST be delivered to the property that the right was filed on. Since we bought more land across the river which had essentially no water right, we built a pipe UNDER the river to send our water across to the other property.
Soo the only way I could really see the government justifying jailing him is if he dug out a giant fucking hole and waited a long time for 13 million gallons of water to build up. Either way, it's water. There's enough to go around. Let the guy have some ponds.
Well if you read the article: "citing a 1925 law that states the city of Medford holds all exclusive rights to "core sources of water" in the Big Butte Creek watershed and its tributaries." The water belongs to the people. The city IS the people. Some of you can be so selfish, thinking you just have the right to anything. Part of living in society is sharing. If everyone collected their own water, society as we know it would not be possible. It's a small-minded way to go about it. It's more efficient to have a centralized collection, filtration, and dispersal system. This provides water to EVERYONE and not just the people with 170 acres of land.
A country where I need a permit to collect rainwater on my own property is a country I dont want to live in. Yeah sure...the guy broke the law. Its a stupid fucking law. Now the government considers rainwater to be their property? LOL
We are Americans. Everything we do fucks the environment up. Our military is the biggest culprit on the planet.
Eh... Sketchy, but I'd rather the city own it than companies like Coca-Cola. I'm not too sure about the validity of this, but I remember watching this video about "water wars", where some corporation (I think Coca-Cola) owned the water rights in some African state, and the people who lived there had to buy tokens to have access to water. And a woman's house and children burned down because she had no access to water, since she had no tokens, and the others in her village couldn't give up the tokens they needed.
People on this forum seem to prefer outrage to reason. Did you even properly read the article? Did you read ANY of the rebuttals to the article? Saying "Its a stupid fucking law" is rhetoric and has next to nil argumentative value.
If he did JUST that, he'd have had no problem. He diverted running water. All I needed to read was that he plead guilty to diversion. That's not "collecting rain water", that's altering flows of water that come onto your land, not flows that BEGIN on your land.
Cruizer u can try to insult my post if u want.. I really dont care. U live in AU. Im 5 hrs from where this is going on. (edited the length of distance. I thought Medford was a bit closer. Guess its a couple hrs further away than I thought) Its a dumb law. The guy should not be wasting tax payers money sitting in jail and in court.. He is obviously a upstanding member of his community and doesnt deserve this punishment. By the way... there is no shortage of rainwater in the pacific northwest...
This is sad. I literally almost cried. This is fucking scary. I'm too high for this right now.. Why would you arrest and put a man in jail for collecting rainwater after he was permitted? Why would you even need a permit for shit like that?! I'm sorry I can't do this anymore I really just don't know how to response to such a strange happening..
The police state is coming guys, get your guns stocked before all hell breaks loose and they start taxing air.
The problem was he was redirecting water from tributaries in his own little ponds. It wasn't like he was just putting some buckets out in the rain.