They will also claim jurisdiction over the puddle created by the water leak in my yard a few years ago.
It will be interesting in my state. A couple of years ago, I had a concern about one of my creeks, which is also a seasonal irrigation diversion for the area, and creek bank maintenance there. Being form CA, I was thinking that there must be a hundred regs and permits that I would have to consider.
I usually follow the, "Which is what happens when you call the feds" thing and avoid contacting the government, but went to the Idaho Dept of Water Resources and ran into the nicest bunch of people who, to make a long story short, told me to "do whatever you want as long as you don't diver the flow, we don't care".
While the only feds that I have had out to my place, NRCS, have pretty much said the same thing, I would expect that the nazi EPA will not be so friendly. I have only one data point interacting with an EPA cop during a USCG thing I was working on back in the day, but that guy both thought he was a SEAL and really stretched "legal" with what we were investigating, continually talking about the hundreds of thousands of dollars in daily fines the gov could get "if we get these guys". It's pretty scary thinking about something like that as a private citizen with limited lawyer funds, especially with past news stories about EPA actually basically enforcing "puddles" (or even places puddles could develop) with fines.
