Rainwater in Utah

[GardenGuru]

I always thought it would be a great idea to catch rainwater and store it. Why not? It's your property, you can catch it and store it, right? Wrong. In Utah it has been illegal to catch and store rainwater for many years. Until now. The Utah legislature is on the brink of passing a bill that would make it legal to catch and store rainwater. Here is the article from the Provo Daily Herald:
SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah Senate has passed a bill that would allow the personal collection of rainwater.
If approved the bill would reverse a decades-old prohibition on rainwater harvesting in the state.
Senate Bill 32 would permit the collection of 2,500 gallons in a storage container. The legislation now advances to the House.
Sen. Scott Jenkins, a Plain City Republican, is sponsoring the bill.


Way to go Scott Jenkins. Lets all hope it passes with flying colors.

[Phil801]

This is AWESOME! It's never made sense that you can't collect rainwater on your own property. I'm very excited and hopeful for this to pass.

Thanks for sharing this article! It gives me hope that sanity will reign (pun intended)

[Ether15:34]

Legal or not, I have been seriously considering building some underground cisterns and piping the rainwater from the roof to them. My biggest questions are these:

1) Cement or plastic tanks?
2) How often is is recommended to clean the tanks?

[Bro Jones]

This did pass. Here is a link to a FAQ at UT division of water rights. Unfortunately you are limited to (2) 100 gallon above ground containers or (1) 2500 gallon below ground container max..

http://www.waterrights.utah.gov/wrinfo/faq.asp#q1

[Oregon Pioneer]

Here's something called hugelkultur- where one buries trees, limbs, agricultural waste, compost.... whatever can be biodegradable, pretty deep under the dirt. Over the years the microbes eat away at the material creating nutrients while it can literally soak up tons of water to be used later. In the simplest of terms you can then plant your vegetables and fruit/nut trees on your manufactured fertilizer-sponge. Once you get your underground sponge sucking up water, you can pile snow on top of it, run roof runoff to it, or even divert clean ditch water into it, so it will be charged for your plants and trees to suck off of it through the summer. I heard an account of a man in Texas not having to water during the summer because he built his garden over an established hugelkultur pit and the plant's tap-roots were easily sucking deep into it. The government can't do anything about this because there's nothing of a plastic or concrete cistern to look for. How would they ever tell you the dirt under your tree is too moist? Sure it's going to take a backhoe rental or buying the deacon's quorum three gallons of ice cream for a big construction, but this is something you can build and forget. It holds more water and produces more nutrients over time. Just be sure you don't use pressure treated or laminated wood because of the anti-bacterial/arsenic chemicals used for the wood's preservation.

I've also heard Saudi prisoners are stacking lines of rocks along the contours of their canyon banks, so it will drop the occasional rain and morning dew quicker into the ground without it evaporating over a large surface area. Grassline patches are coming up that their goats can forage on. I would like to know more about this and it would be more pertinent for those of you in Utah. Here in Oregon water is not so much of a problem.

http://www.thesurvivalpodcast.com/pe...or-water-needs