A plan to suck, truck and bottle Arkansas Valley spring water has residents here crusading against the world's largest food and beverage company.
"Nestle is seeking to drain the blood of Chaffee County," said Salida local Daniel Zettler during a fiery public hearing last week.
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Excellent and detailed (with links) description of a growing concern in the USA: newfangled water wars. Swiss mega-corp Nestle is buying up water rights across America to provide the product for their $4.3 billion bottled water business in the USA. Blevins captures the essence of the issue and presents the conflicting views of Nestle, local officials, developers, and the rank-and-file citizens who count on having their community's natural water supply available forever. The "how it would work" sidebar and related links add depth to the story for readers seeking more information. I would add a link or two to information about the globalization of water through commercial monopolies and looming water shortages worldwide.
Nestle — with 12 U.S. brands of bottled water and almost $4.3 billion in North American sales in 2007 — came calling for Arkansas Valley spring water about two years ago. The company wants to draw 65 million gallons a year from an aquifer feeding two freshwater springs near Nathrop, pipe it 5 miles to a truck stop and ship it 100 miles to a Denver bottling facility. It would be sold under the company’s Arrowhead brand.
Nestle has promised to replace all the water it takes from the valley and spend $1 million to restore riverside habitat where a dilapidated fishery sits. It has installed 10 monitoring wells to gauge the health of the underground aquifer that supplies the springs and will monitor wetlands near them. Nestle hydrogeologist Bruce Lauerman calls the plan a “sustainable, surgical extraction” of water and describes preserving the pristine water supply by taking only a fraction of its flows.
“We are one of the best things that could happen to these springs,” he said. “Our involvement affords a level of protection that other owners and users of this property could never offer.” Maybe so, say many locals. But no thanks.
Last April, residents of Enumclaw, Wash., rallied to repel Nestle’s plan to annually bottle 100 million gallons of local spring water. Residents of McCloud, Calif., are in a five-year legal battle to stop Nestle’s plans for a water-bottling plant. Residents in Maine, Michigan and New Hampshire also are challenging Nestle’s plans to bottle their spring water. “It’s hard to anticipate all the scenarios, and Nestle has the ability to fight something for 20 years,” said Jane Browning, who lives in Howard, southeast of Salida. “We don’t have that ability.”
How it would work •Nestle Waters North America, a subsidiary of the Switzerland-based conglomerate, will replace water it draws from the Chaffee County aquifer below the springs with water it plans to lease from the city of Aurora. •Aurora owns senior water rights near the headwaters of the Arkansas River and is negotiating a 10-year deal with Nestle. •Nestle’s studies of the springs and aquifers show it would need to put about 0.3 cubic feet per second back into the river. •If the county approves the plan, Nestle will build production wells on land it owns near two springs and draw a year-round average of 125 gallons per minute. •Nestle’s research shows that its withdrawal amounts to 10 percent of the springs’ capacity. The company says its tests show the aquifer recharging in a few hours after heavy test pumping.
If this grand scheme were even remotely feasible, and water were in endless abundance, why doesn’t Nestle Waters simply buy their “leased” water from Aurora and bottle it? What about the water supply in, say, Switzerland, where Nestle’s corporate headquarters sits? More importantly, what will become of the good citizens of Colorado when their wells go dry?
New twist on classic water wars: This time, instead of cattle-folk vs farmers, the opponents are mega-conglomerate international bottling companies (Nestle in this case) vs local citizens vs developers, politicians, and people looking for jobs. Long a problem in undeveloped nations, water sellouts to foreign interests are now a growing threat to communities in this affluent nation. While we worry about the price of oil and the global economic collapse, international megacorps are locking up rights to our most basic need: life-giving water.