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Show 350 APPROPRIATION OF WATER In California, detention of surplus water above the immediate needs of a riparian owner from a wet season to a dry season is not a proper riparian use. It constitutes an appropriation of the water.622 Along with recognition of the value and encouragement of the principle of reservoir storage have gone admonitions of the necessity of proceeding with full regard for established water rights. Thus, in the Meridian case, the California Supreme Court cautioned that the right of storage must necessarily be subordinate to beneficial uses of the stream water made in the exercise of riparian and prior appropriative rights therein.623 And the Montana Supreme Court placed upon subsequent reservoir users the burden of showing that the construction, maintenance, and use of their reservoirs does not interfere with the rights of prior appropriators.624 Nearly all western water appropriation statutes take specific note of storage as a means of effectuating and exercising an appropriation of water. In some cases, this is done in requiring that an application to appropriate water in which storage is included shall state certain particulars of the storage plan. In other States, storage appropriations require more than one permit. And still other statutes contain special features pertaining to the storage water right. Method of Appropriation One appropriation method followed in the West makes no distinction between direct flow and storage rights. It treats them as steps in the acquisition of a single appropriative right. Another method deals with these as separate segments of the overall plan of water utilization and provides separate complementary procedures therefor. Under a third plan, entirely separate appropriations are involved. Storage and direct flow procedures integrated. -This plan is followed in the larger number of Western States. In acquiring an appropriative right that includes storage, the procedures of diverting, impounding, distributing, and applying the water to beneficial use are simply phases of one complete administrative procedure. Included in the application for a permit are statements of proposed storage facilities, capacity of reservoir, quantity of water to be collected in an on-channel reservoir and rediverted after release for direct use downstream, quantity to be diverted for storage away from the stream, and periods of impounding and release from storage. which are put to beneficial uses. Cal. Laws 1969, ch. 482, § 9, Water Code § 1242.5 (West Supp. 1970). 622Lodi v. East Bay Municipal Utility Dist., 7 Cal. (2d) 316, 335, 60 Pac. (2d) 439 (1936). 623Meridian v. San Francisco, 13 Cal. (2d) 424, 449-450, 90 Pac. (2d) 537 (1939). 62ADonich v. Johnson, 77 Mont. 229, 239-241, 250 Pac. 963 (1926). See Kelly v. Granite Bi-Metallic ConsolidatedMin. Co., 41 Mont. 1, 10-12, 108 Pac. 785 (1910);Knutson v. Huggins, 62 Idaho 662, 668, 115 Pac. (2d) 421 (1941). |