It is nice to see the state is slowly moving out of the stone age (“It’s legal to collect your own rain,” Whidbey News-Times).

With all the rain that falls in parts of this state I figured they would know how to deal with it. The floods of the last few years pretty much disprove that. Where I grew up in the Midwest we had about the same average rain fall as Seattle. I suppose there is some historical reason for not using rain water such as typhoid or cholera. However our house had a rainwater cistern that collected runoff from the roof and I don’t remember anyone dying from using it. The cistern was the size of several hundred of the barrels shown in the photo, which would have been considered a joke.

People there also farmed the river bottom land, but they knew enough not to live in it like those along the Skagit, Green and other rivers around here. Maybe it is a Dutch thing here, and they just forgot the windmills to keep it pumped out.

Dave Flomerfelt

Oak Harbor