As part of the construction for the Jim Mitchell Community Park in Warner, NH, MainStreet Warner, Inc. has buried 3,400 gallon rainwater harvesting system. I caught up with Steve Bridgewater (Greenleaf Irrigation, Warner, NH) last Friday as his crew was hooking up the water feed line from the roof gutters.
It’s been a dry summer, and a hot one, too, and wells are getting low, so more and more people around here are looking at their roofs. Some, like Hugh Wilkerson, are even buying plastic barrels and pvc pipe. Our friend Nate Nichols in Contoocook scored a couple of 500 gallon galvanized maple sap tanks.
If you live in Colorado, grabbing the water off your roof has been illegal; it’s an act of water piracy that can land you a fine, or worse. That water has traditionally been the property of the owners of water rights to the water in the watershed, and water is thicker than blood in the west. Who shot your rain barrel full of holes? The rancher who owns the water that falls on your roof. In 2009 Colorado nudged the law a bit towards the sensible, but not by much. Now it’s legal to keep your own water, but only if you own a well. Urban dwellers need not apply.
Jim Mitchell, who had the vision to see a park next to the bookstore where there was only a scrappy hillside, was the guy who kept a lot of us townspeople smiling, and somehow kept our weather sunny, even when the days seemed gloomy. And then he died. It makes me smile now to think what Jim might have said about a couple of huge tanks sitting underground, gathering the rain water that will irrigate the park that bears his name. “Well, don’t just stand there; let it rain!”