[dfsegoat]

Colorado Water access law is truly crazy and arcane in some cases (such as this, it would seem).

Source: Had a friend in college that interned for a group of attorneys in Western, CO whose entire practice was around water access rights.

She explained to me some of the ridiculous things that neighbors requiring common water access could do to each other - based purely on who was using the water first.

[mooreds]

I don't think it is just Colorado. The water law in the west (of the USA) is all messed up. Or at least was created in a different time with different needs and different rainfall.

https://extension.unr.edu/publication.aspx?PubID=3750 has more details.

[masklinn]

> Or at least was created in a different time with different needs and different rainfall.

And straight up lies. The Colorado water compact “average flow” was known to be nonsense when it was established, but politicians ignored the engineers’ estimates of long-term averages which were significantly lower than the figure the compact is based on.

[amanaplanacanal]

I'm sure it made sense at the time. It was essentially homesteading. Just like you could grab a chuck of untamed land and fence it, plow it, build on it, and then you owned it. Water worked the same way.

Of course this ignored the people who were already living there, but they had the wrong skin color and religion.

[lazide]

It’s messed up anywhere there are periods of sufficiency and insufficiency, no matter what the rules are.

Either ‘first user wins’, like here, or ‘all users get allotment’ - in which case you can be screwed by someone building a new subdivision, or ‘gov’t entity allocates’ in which case corruption/payoffs become the norm, etc, etc.

At least it’s better than ‘shoot anyone using your well without permission’ like used to be the middle eastern standard eh?

[njovin]

The Water Knife is a fun fiction book about exactly this.

The synopsis is that in the near-future water in the west is SCARCE and there are dueling factions (NGOs, state governments, criminals) fighting legally and physically over water, including digging through old libraries and government offices for water right contracts that may be older than the known ones to usurp the standing owner's right.

[taminka]

https://youtu.be/XusyNT_k-1c?si=8R8oXaj8Itmwxw0V good overview in video form :)

[fred_is_fred]

It makes complete sense based on when the laws were passed. You dam a creek and your neighbors cows starve.

[vondur]

I remember reading in Colorado you aren't allowed to collect rainfall for your own use.