Domestic wells in Rio Blanco County

1,195 of the 3,486 well permits in Rio Blanco County — 34.3% — are decreed for domestic.

How this group compares

Rio Blanco County holds 0.5% of Colorado’s 243,096 domestic permits, while holding 0.6% of the register overall — so it is under-represented in this use.

Domestic means household water, and usually a little more — the commonest decreed use in Colorado by a wide margin.

What happened to these permits

652 of the 1,195 permits decreed for domestic in Rio Blanco County ended with a well the Division was told about — 54.6%. And 250 expired without one: 20.9%.

An expired permit is the trap in a rural sale. A seller can produce a permit that lapsed years ago, and a permit is not a water right — the two are separate, and a purchase turns on both. What an expired permit does and does not mean.

Buying land in Rio Blanco County, or need a well drilled?

1,195 well permits are on the Division’s register in Rio Blanco County, 250 of them expired. This site tells you what a permit says; it does not drill, and it is not advice on a water right. Tell us where and we pass the request to drillers and water-rights advisers working in Colorado.

We take no commission and we recommend no driller. We have no arrangement with any firm today — we are collecting these requests in order to go and find them. What we do with this.

The permits

Part of a bigger picture: all 3,486 permits in Rio Blanco County, and every domestic permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Domestic — Lincoln 1,331
• Stock — Las Animas 1,309
• Irrigation — Logan 1,288
• Not stated — El Paso 1,210
• Stock — Baca 1,206
• Monitoring/sampling — Eagle 1,202
• Domestic — Otero 1,182
• Monitoring/sampling — Montrose 1,173
• Irrigation — El Paso 1,164
• Other — El Paso 1,162
• Commercial — La Plata 1,103