If the house was not there, would the water naturally run off on the natural watercourse to your neighbours land? Or does the storm water discharge at another point?
Are you on acreage ? Or on a residential house block?
I’m struggling to workout why your not connected to council stormwater and why your council is not interested in your issues?
As for an easment, if your neighbor does not want it, how can you make them agree? As you need their consent? To burden their land.
Apologies. I was avoiding a long winded description (I didn't want to confuse the issue).
My house is on a battleaxe block, downhill from my street (my roof is about level with my street), in a residential area. There is no stormwater drainage in my street. However, I am only halfway down a hill and the neighbours behind me live in a street that runs along the bottom of the hill. That street does have stormwater drainage.
I have a neighbour directly behind me, who is not the neighbour I am referring to. If my house didn't exist, the house directly behind me would cop all the water. If my pipes were cut off at my fenceline, it is the neighbours directly behind that would get all the water.
The people who own the property with the easement are neighbours of those directly behind me, so our properties just touch on the diagonal.
My stormwater pipe existed before any of these properties were built upon, and it used to jut out into the never never and water ran down to the street below through the vacant land.
When people built directly behind me (many years ago), I was conscious that our pipe created a few issues during heavy rain but never heard anything about it.
A house in my street, a couple of doors up, was sold and nearly doubled in size after rennovation. At this time, I am guessing that the council insisted that stormwater provision was made despite no stormwater drainage in our street. Therefore they sought and were granted an easement on what was then an empty block of land (the owner had 2 side by side blocks and the house was on the other block). The easement runs the full length of the back boundary, then does a right angle turn where it meets our property before running down to the street. Where it meets our corner, there is a grated pit to (I guess) facilitate drain clearing etc if needed. Just after the easement drainage was completed, I approached the then owner to ask if my stormwater pipe could be extended a metre or so to hover over the grate of the easement, thus preventing some of the water runoff that was certainly going to the folks directly behind. Most of my water was already squirting out in the direction of the grate anyway, this just gave it a bit more direction. The owner of the land was happy with me doing that.
Fast forward. The vacant land was sold and a house built on the property. About 12 months ago we had a very bad storm and my stormwater washed away the landscaping of the 'diagonal' neighbours (as well as washing mud into the people directly behinds pool). That is when the diagonal neighbours started to complain. They did not want us to do anything re laying pipes on their property despite it being the overwhelmingly obvious solution.
I cannot run pipes to the street from the other side of my property, so I am trying to find out if it is true that 2 pipes cannot share an easement. If that is so, I am really in trouble, however if that is not the case, at least I just need to try and convince the diagonal neighbours to agree to my using the easement.
I just want to resolve this to everyone's satisfaction, but I need to know what I am dealing with from a legal perspective.
The council is probably avoiding the issue because they never planned the development of the area adequately in the first place. My house was built in 1960. Back then the area was peppered with market gardens and development was just starting to take off. Our street was a dirt road back then.....
