DENVER
— When Jason Story bought an old soy sauce barrel to collect the rain
dripping from his downspout, he figured he had found an environmentally
friendly way to water his garden’s beets and spinach. But under the
quirks of Western water rules, where raindrops are claimed even as they
tumble from the sky, he became a water outlaw.
Water
is precious in the arid West, now more than ever as the worst drought
in decades bakes fields in California and depletes reservoirs across the
region. To encourage conservation, cities and water agencies in
California and other states have begun nudging homeowners to use
captured rain for their gardens, rather than water from the backyard
faucet.
But
Colorado is one of the last places in the country where rainwater
barrels are still largely illegal because of a complex system of water
rights in which nearly every drop is spoken for.
And when legislators here tried to enact a law
this spring to allow homeowners to harvest the rain, conservationists
got a lesson in the power of the entrenched rules that allocate Western
water to those who have first claim to it. Even if it is the rain
running down someone’s roof.
“Where does it stop?” said Mr. Story, 40, a regional manager of a beverage company. “Does that mean you own the cloud, too?”
The rain barrel debate was a microcosm of intense fights across the region over who should get to keep using water and who should have to cut back.
In
California, farmers and other residents are cutting their water use by
25 percent or more. Cities in Colorado’s fast-growing Front Range, in
the central part of the state, are vying with farms and users on the
wetter, western side of the state as officials piece together a water
plan. And as water grows scarcer, critics have assailed a water rights system that is based largely on seniority and century-old claims to stream flows.
“Water allocation doesn’t satisfy most people’s norms of fairness,” said Doug Kenney, director of the Western Water Policy Program
at the University of Colorado Law School. “A lot of people are clearly
surprised to see that it’s a system where some people will get 100
percent of their water, and others will get zero.”
In
Colorado, the rain barrel idea was modest: A bill with bipartisan
support would allow homeowners to buy two 55-gallon water tanks that,
together, would be able to collect about 650 gallons every year — just
about what an average American uses in a week.
A
few years ago, laws were passed that exempted a small number of people
from the rule against barrels — for example, some who are not served by
municipal water systems — but legislators wanted to allow everyone with a
barrel to collect and use what poured off their roof.
The biggest newspapers in the state
got behind the idea, as did several city governments and water
officials. Conservation groups said it would cost nothing to carry out
and would not take any water out of the streams and rivers that supply
users downstream. Most rain soaks into the ground or simply evaporates,
long before it can cascade into a storm drain and toward any parched
ranch or farmer’s irrigation ditch.
But
some irrigation officials and politicians who represent thirsty
ranchers on the state’s eastern plains saw a threat — as well as a
violation of property rights and water principles that are written into
the State Constitution. Extreme Weather
“It’s actually stealing,” said State Senator Jerry Sonnenberg,
a Republican from Sterling, a northeastern farming and ranching town on
the plains, who voted against the rain barrel measure when it landed in
the Agriculture, Natural Resources and Energy Committee he leads. “You
might say, it’s a little bit of water, just a barrelful, how much damage
could that do to someone downstream?”
But,
he continued, “If it’s just a little bit, why wouldn’t we allow
everyone go to into 7-Eleven and take just one bottle of water, just a
little bit?”
Water
use multiplies fast, and critics said that millions of gallons of water
could be pulled out of the system if the entire state caught
rain-barrel fever.
Colorado’s
Constitution and years of legal cases have established that the
hierarchy of water stems from when a farmer, public agency, company or
other user secured the right to draw it from the surface water system.
Just because water flows across a person’s property — be it a river or a
trickle of rainwater — does not mean the person owns it, water
officials said.
How to Save Water: The California Way
Drought is not new to California. Indeed most of its
residents have been living with it for years, making them experts in
conservation. We asked our readers in California how they have adapted
to a life with less water. Here are some of their suggestions and tips
on how to live with drought.
“Normally
we’re very water short, and the priority doctrine is set up to allocate
water in these times of shortage,” said Joe Frank, the general manager
of the Lower South Platte Water Conservancy District. He opposed the rainwater measure. “Even in average years, there’s not enough water to go around.”
People
who illegally divert water can face fines of $500 a day if they defy
orders from state regulators, but a spokesman for the Colorado
Department of Natural Resources, Todd Hartman, said he did not know of
any case in which a homeowner had been cited for having a rain barrel.
The
amount of water in question is so low, said Kevin Rein, the deputy
state engineer, that “we simply do not have the ability to monitor rain
barrel use.”
That
is good for people like Deb Neeley, an office manager and urban farmer
who lives near a small lake by the western border of Denver and collects
water from a gutter off her greenhouse. She said that her plants grow
better when they are watered by rain and that she did not feel as if she
was robbing water from anyone else.
But if rain barrel use suddenly explodes, she said, officials should measure whether it has any effects farther downstream.
“If
I felt that I were taking away from other people I wouldn’t do it,” she
said. “I don’t feel guilty doing it. I feel like it’s the right thing
to do to capture this resource.”
A version of this article appears in print on June 16, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Thirsty Colorado Is Battling Over Who Owns Raindrops .
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