We also advise clients on how they can legally prevent their properties being flooded, and how they can overcome objections to development based on floodplain zoning.
Problems arising from water flowing over ground or underground without having a defined channel are a completely different field; decided common law cases have been less than sympathetic to a local authority whose waterworks dried up after a neighbour spitefully took the water out of the ground for himself, and another landowner whose property collapsed as a result of water taken out of the ground by his neighbours.
Statute, however, provides a number of controls on the abstraction of water from watercourses or from groundwater.