Does Rainwater Belong to the Government?

planetsave.com...

Rain falls from the sky, hits your roof and runs in to your drums or barrels or tanks.

If only it were that simple.

Notch up another one for the members of the Idiots Anonymous who have apparently been camping out in Bellingham, Washington. Apparently, rainwater doesn’t actually belong to individuals, but to the state as a whole. Therefore, all the wonderful efforts of communities to collect water are actually illegal.

What is going on in the world when people are told that rainwater belongs to the government? The article makes a good point, is the grass in your back garden hogging water as well? Will they soon give out permits for water butts in the back garden? Storing rainwater is one of the easiest ways to help the enviroment, storing it to water your plants instead of sucking water from the tap.

What do the rest of you think, does rainwater really belong to the state?

Quite strictly speaking, nothing belongs to The State. But, if they can lay claim to the rain I suppose it's not much of leap to claim everything else.

Edited to add: Come to think of it, I wouldn't be terribly shocked if the laws originated to protect water shed areas from excessive collection and that the origin lay in enviromentalism itself. I've done no reasearch in that regard so I don't really know but again, I wouldn't be surprised in the least.

[edit on 7/24/2008 by EnlightenUp]

its a start of lunacy laws, I wonder when they're going to start saying that the air you breath also belongs to the state.?
That way they can decie who lives to breath it and who doesn't.

If they could, they would bring in Oxygen permits tomorrow.
The state thinks it owns all things including you.
Evil psychopathic dictators is what they are.

Yes buying air has also been promoted, usually under the guise of enviromentalism. Making someone responsible for every square metre of air and water will apparently mean we help the enviroment. It's a very scary thought that we will no lnoger be able to call the rain our own, surely it belongs to all humans it falls on?

I read the article and now it makes more sense.

In the USA you have 2 totally different issues in relationship to water. In the eastern half of the country basically divided by the Missouri River, you have states with no water rights laws. West of the Missouri River, the more arid part of the country, you have water rights laws.

The water rights goes with the property owner in a water rights state, unless a previous claim was made through the lifetime of the property being sold. Same as mineral rights in this regards.

Washington State has water rights already in place. Somewhere there is a paper trail of who owns the water that falls onto the individual property, each in question. Silly as this sounds, it's the law, and has been upheld in court many times.

Research a little in water rights for your state, it'll be clear as mud.

reply to post by hinky


Well i'm in the UK so i don't have a state but the point stands that the idea of someone owning the rain is rediculous. Rain clouds often form miles away and come in land, if we start talking about ownership then could a cloud that formed over africa and dropped it's rain in england be termed as theft?

Ahh i should have been a solicitor

Colorado has done much the same: www.durangoherald.com.../earth/08/earth080717_1.htm

In the article it was noted the difficulty of enforcing such actions as citizens collecting rainwater for their own uses. Interesting to me (also in the article) was a statement that water conservation starts in the home, and it claimed that the average U.S. citizen uses a whopping 150 gallons PER DAY. I would really like to see this statistic verified or disproven. Hard to imagine that as a national average.

Since we collect rainwater in a cistern, I'm very aware of our usage.... just the two of us, and rarely do we use any more than 20 gallons/day, and much of that is watering the garden. Obviously, laundry days have a higher usage, but even that gray water (and all our gray water) is piped out of the house to water fruit and other trees. I recognize this practice isn't legal in many places.

In dry times, we use the cistern for us, and the well for plants.

Originally posted by argentus
Colorado has done much the same: www.durangoherald.com.../earth/08/earth080717_1.htm

In the article it was noted the difficulty of enforcing such actions as citizens collecting rainwater for their own uses. Interesting to me (also in the article) was a statement that water conservation starts in the home, and it claimed that the average U.S. citizen uses a whopping 150 gallons PER DAY. I would really like to see this statistic verified or disproven. Hard to imagine that as a national average.

150 GALLONS a day???? where the heck did they come up with a figure like that from? what the statisticians do ? go round a house and turn ALL the taps on and leave them on full flow overnight?
I'd be lucky over here in the UK to use 10 gallons a day, we just use a shower and the lavvy a couple of time a day.....

reply to post by DataWraith


I think they're taking into account everything, the water used to produce your food, the water you drink each day, the milk, etc etc. If you add all that up then yes you can probably reach that figure. I would guess that the average person only uses 30-40 gallons is you only count drinking water, toilet water and washing.

reply to post by ImaginaryReality1984


Indians believe one can't own the earth, the earth is god. We'll I don't think Earth is God. I believe it's part of God. Then again, so am I. You can't own our rainwater, its everybody's.

This statement in no way takes into account the written law of the country.

reply to post by ImaginaryReality1984
It's about flourine. Unless you drink tap water exclusively you are considered a threat.

In my opinion rain barrells should be required seeing as how many people in New Orleans died of dehydration or from drinking bad water after Katrina.


[edit on 24-7-2008 by eradown]

reply to post by eradown


You'll forgive me not believing that. It has been shown that natural water sources often contain more flouride than processed water from treatment plants. Whilst flouride can be used as a calming agent it has to be used in large doses. The water where i live coming out of the tap has about one third the flouride of the local spring water.

I am more worried about the idea of ownership, will a day truly come where every atom is owned by someone? Where pockets of air are owned by a corporation? Where water will not just be as it is now, charged by how much you use, but also limited so you can only get it from official sources without breaking the law.

reply to post by ImaginaryReality1984
I would not trust the source that told you spring water has more flouride than treated waste from the city tap. Flouride in tap water causes a twenty point reduction in I.Q. This is done purposefully because people at the top want to keep the competition at bay. Bottled spring water from an actual spring is still better for drinking than waste which has been endlessly recycled. Owning a well would be better than buying spring water .There are several new laws in my state which require special permitts in order to dig a well. This is connected to the silly laws in your state being passed on rain barrells. Even the inbredelites are not stupid enough to think they own elements and compounds. It is just their desire that you drink tap water alone so they can drug you.

Originally posted by ImaginaryReality1984
reply to post by eradown

 

You'll forgive me not believing that. It has been shown that natural water sources often contain more flouride than processed water from treatment plants. Whilst flouride can be used as a calming agent it has to be used in large doses. The water where i live coming out of the tap has about one third the flouride of the local spring water.

That entirely depends on where the spring water for this comparison was derived. I am sure monsanto vegetables compared to organic vegetables grown next to a toxic waste dump would also appear superior. It is usually city water treatment workers and psuedo environmentalists who have nothing but kind things to say about over flouridated tap water. I discount what water treatment workers say because they are protecting their jobs and I discount what psuedo environmentalist say ( along with their partisans in the main stream press) ,because I know for a fact they want seven out of ten of us dead. They are not above lying to accomplish their goal.



[edit on 25-7-2008 by eradown]

The CorpGov will attempt to commodify anything and everything, all in the name of profits. This will only get worse and worse as the the politics of fear - Global Warming and Disaster Capitalism - spread.

reply to post by eradown


The spring water is a local spring used for years and is not polluted accoridng ot the person who tested it, someone i know myself from the local council so not exactly up to lying to me. It's a natural spring bubbling up through rock, it takes about 400 years for the water to reach the spring from what he said, so technically the water reaching it is 400 years old, well before flouride pollution.

So it has a natural flouride content higher than our local tap water. I'm sorry but i think the flouride thing is a load of rubbish, whilst they are adding it undeniably, and high amounts can cause a relaxed and pasive attitude, the natural sources are higher than many city sources.

So what other reason is there for stopping us colecting rainwater? Is it simply so they can squeeze every penny they can out of us?

If a rainstorm crosses state lines, does one state have to buy the rain from the previous

Now this is ridiculous! I have worked as a wetland environmental consultant for the federal, state and local governments and I have never heard of this. As I understand it, rainwater belongs to no one until it moves from upland drainage's to creeks. Once it hits the creeks, then it is property of the US Army Corps of Engineers all the way out to the ocean. I would like to see a state try to make their State Law trump Federal Law.

[edit on 25-7-2008 by no name needed]

reply to post by no name needed


That's a very good point expanding upon my idea of ownership. Could a state sue another state over such an issue? Obviously this is rediculous but if we accept rainfall as property then you can easily see it becoming possible to sue someone over it.

Originally posted by ImaginaryReality1984
planetsave.com...

Rain falls from the sky, hits your roof and runs in to your drums or barrels or tanks.

If only it were that simple.

Notch up another one for the members of the Idiots Anonymous who have apparently been camping out in Bellingham, Washington. Apparently, rainwater doesn’t actually belong to individuals, but to the state as a whole. Therefore, all the wonderful efforts of communities to collect water are actually illegal.

What is going on in the world when people are told that rainwater belongs to the government? The article makes a good point, is the grass in your back garden hogging water as well? Will they soon give out permits for water butts in the back garden? Storing rainwater is one of the easiest ways to help the enviroment, storing it to water your plants instead of sucking water from the tap.

What do the rest of you think, does rainwater really belong to the state?

ok now what if the clouds absorbed the water in international waters? how does that make it theirs?

very odd, i live in seattle and it rains so much, we got it coming out our asses, like anal leakage (kidding, a joke from another post)

seriously how would they even know if you are using that water or not

seriously, i just dont get life sometimes