The AllWaterRights Blog is Moving! http://www.shawnpike.com is my permanent site, and as soon as I get the formatting done all the new posts will be over there.
In the meantime, how does someone search for water rights in California? It used to be an onerous task – and today it is only half-onerous. 🙂 Actually the Water Board gets more information every day and puts it into the Electronic Water Rights Information Management System – eWRIMS for short (pronounced
ee-rims). This screenshot shows the two important links. The first is to the database, which gives text tables of results and links to some form-entered documents, and some scanned documents. The second link goes to the geographic information system (GIS), which consists of mapped points linked to the database, on top of reference maps.
What can you find here? In short, nearly all the post-1914 appropriative Water Rights Applications, Permits, and Licenses can be found here. Most of the pre-1914 appropriative, and an increasing number of riparian water rights can be found here. The 2009 water laws that increased reporting requirements and greatly increased penalties, moved most water right holders who had not been filing, to get on the train and avoid the pain. If you search with no parameters, then the database returns a listing of all records, over 52,000 right now.
What’s missing? Nearly all adjudicated water rights are not found on eWRIMS. There are thousands of rights defined in numerous Superior Court Decrees, that are not found in the database. Statements of Use are filed for these rights, but not in a form that is easy to put into eWRIMS. Where could you find these? We’ll cover that in future posts.
http://www.shawnpike.com is up and running, right now with the brief front page. More to come soon! A good night to all.
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