Here's a headline from 2009:
It’s Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado
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DURANGO,
Colo. — For the first time since territorial days, rain will be free
for the catching here, as more and more thirsty states part ways with
one of the most entrenched codes of the West.
Precipitation,
every last drop or flake, was assigned ownership from the moment it
fell in many Western states, making scofflaws of people who scooped
rainfall from their own gutters. In some instances, the rights to that
water were assigned a century or more ago.
Now
two new laws in Colorado will allow many people to collect rainwater
legally. The laws are the latest crack in the rainwater edifice, as
other states, driven by population growth, drought, or declining
groundwater in their aquifers, have already opened the skies or begun
actively encouraging people to collect.
“I
was so willing to go to jail for catching water on my roof and watering
my garden,” said Tom Bartels, a video producer here in southwestern
Colorado, who has been illegally watering his vegetables and fruit trees
from tanks attached to his gutters. “But now I’m not a criminal.”
Who
owns the sky, anyway? In most of the country, that is a question for
philosophy class or bad poetry. In the West, lawyers parse it with
straight faces and serious intent. The result, especially stark here in
the Four Corners area of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, is a
crazy quilt of rules and regulations — and an entire subculture of
people like Mr. Bartels who have been using the rain nature provided but
laws forbade.
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