D Kat wrote:

If you have an intake pipe, are you not diverting water as well? I don't
know how it is with this administration (have the rescinded all
environmental protections yet?) but at one time you had to go through the
EPA if you even thought about such things. DKat

Water rights are state jurisdiction, water channel changes, such as
making a pond under the described conditions is Army Corps of Engineers.

Considering that your lawn can be declared "wetlands" and under Army
Corps of Engineers jurisdiction as "Navigatable waterways" if rain or
melting snow causes the soil to be saturated, I certainly hope some of
the environmental protections get tossed out.

BTW, farmers have lost control of their fields, some under cultivation
for many years, because the soil was saturated during the spring. It's
little stretch to apply the same to lawns. (I'm still gloating about
the trapping laws mess in Washington State. The yuppies cannot trap
gophers or moles messing up their lawns, because of a law *they*
shoved down the throats of the farmers and trappers. The rural people
are refusing to budge on allowing a partial repeal unless it all goes.
They have the numbers to block it, when combined with the loony left.)

Laws and regulations have no relationship to sanity, nor do they need
to actually accomplish their proported purpose.

As an example, a farmer was notified he could not work his fields any
more, because an endangered kangaroo rat lived in those fields. He
stopped working them, the brush grew up and changed the habitat, and
the rats died out. They cannot survive in thick brush, and that
farmer's field was the only habitat for them in the area. Another
species a little closer to extinction due to foolishly written or
enforced laws.

Excuse me, but you punched one of my "hot buttons". I won't go into a
zinc mine sterilizing a river in Tennessee, or British Petroleum
getting a special deal on oil in the Elk Hills (an environmentally
sensitive area in SoCal), as both involve a prior administration.