Neighbor Wars·
THE RAINWATER FEUD
A full-time student battles a belligerent neighbor who trespasses to dump rainwater caches, triggering a dispute over legality, access rights, and a feud that tests boundaries.
Would you handle the text first or the property first?
Be one of the first to vote.
The neighbor didn't just complain, he went onto the property and dumped out every rainwater cache.
"he went into my property and dumped out all my rainwater caches," the poster wrote, then added the part that made the whole thing even stranger: "Edit: Rainwater collection is legal in my state."
The poster has rural property about an hour from where they live, and the trouble started with a text message from a belligerent neighbor. In that message, the neighbor admitted he had entered the land and emptied the containers. The poster was left staring at a simple question with a complicated answer: "What do I do?"
The rainwater wasn't sitting there for no reason. The poster said it was meant to water plants and to have on hand "in case brush-burning escapes the burn barrel." There were also mosquito dunks in the containers. None of that mattered to the neighbor, who had apparently decided to handle the situation himself.
Getting back to the property wasn't easy. The poster said it was "a bad time" to make the trip until after finals, and even then the drive would mean about $30 in fuel, not small money for a full-time student. So for the moment, the trespass and the dumped water sat in a text thread, not on the ground where it happened.
The conflict, though, had been building for a while. "Neighbor has been mad since day 1 of me buying the property," the poster said. The land has a legal easement, and the only clear spot on it is at the end of that easement. The neighbor likes to walk down it sometimes, and according to the poster, that's where the resentment keeps surfacing.
What sets him off, the poster said, is not just the land itself but what's stored there. "I have gardening equipment, chainsaws, and PPE stored in my property but he can see it," the poster wrote. That visible equipment seems to have become part of the feud, even though it's on the poster's legal property.
So the situation landed in a strange place: a neighbor had already trespassed and dumped the water, the poster knew rainwater collection was allowed, and the property was still an hour away. The immediate damage was done. The question left hanging was how to respond when the only evidence so far was the neighbor's own text admitting he had done it.