"Tucson’s Rain-Catching Revolution"

"In the Sonoran Desert, rainwater harvesting is finally going mainstream."

"In the mid-1980s, Brent Cluff lived in a low-slung four-bedroom house on a quiet street in Oro Valley, an upscale suburb northwest of Tucson. Saguaro and prickly pear, mesquite trees and shrubs filled his front yard and most of the others on the street.

His backyard, however, stood out, with peach, plum and apricot trees, and a vegetable garden overflowing with cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots and okra. It was completely irrigated by stormwater, captured from the street by an eight-inch pipe and used to fill a figure 8-shaped 100,000-gallon concrete pond. The pond was stocked with trout from northern Arizona; periodically, Cluff let Cub Scouts fish there.

In his late 40s, Cluff was by turns a genial, brusque and combative visionary, sporting a crop of gray hair. A University of Arizona water researcher, he published more than a dozen papers on water harvesting, including one on his pond. It was more than an amenity, he said;  it was an essential survival tool for his desert city and the apocalyptic droughts he believed were inevitable."

Tony Davis reports for High Country News April 27, 2015.