This water war can’t be bottled up

Like many small towns across America, this was a community that once rallied around high school football. Today, the school enrolls too few students to field a team.

Most families moved out after the lumber mill shut its doors in 2003, leaving this town of 1,300 in the mountains of far Northern California without the industry it had relied on since its founding more than a century ago.

No longer able to sustain itself through timber, McCloud turned for economic salvation to the other natural resource in abundance along the icy flanks of Mt. Shasta -- water.

“When they had the mill, this town was jumping,” said McCloud homeowner Paula Kleinhans. “As soon as the mill closed down, people moved, they lost their jobs, and now there are no children here. It really needs industry here.”

Whether that void should be filled by the bottled-water industry has become a point of contention in this sparsely populated region about 200 miles north of California’s state capital. Similar debates are playing out nationwide as water-bottling companies seeking to expand are met with increasing resistance.

Plans to tap local water sources are being greeted with skepticism from New Hampshire to Florida to California, as many parts of the country face drought and dwindling water supplies.

“It’s no longer this limitless resource,” said Elaine Renich, a Lake County Commissioner whose central Florida county is opposing plans by California-based Niagara Bottling LLC to pump water from the region’s shrinking aquifer. “It’s beyond me how you can expect people to conserve water and you turn around and say a water-bottling plant is OK.”

Supporters view bottling plants as job generators that can bring much-needed revenue to regions in need of an economic boost.

Others fear that diverting thousands of gallons a day from aquifers and natural springs will drain private and municipal wells, creeks and streams.

A U.S. House of Representatives committee held a hearing last year to assess the environmental risks of the bottled-water industry and question the privatization of water sources.

Community and environmental groups are taking an increasingly aggressive stance, asking water bottlers to scale back their plans or filing lawsuits seeking to have them stopped.

In drought-stricken central Florida, residents and commissioners in Lake County are urging the regional water district to deny a pumping permit to Niagara Bottling. The company wants to pump about 480,000 gallons a day. Meanwhile, local officials are planning for water shortages they say will come as early as 2013 when the aquifer runs dry.

In southern New Hampshire, residents are trying to block New Hampshire-based USA Springs from pumping more than 300,000 gallons a day from the 100 acres it bought in the area. The state has given the company a permit that critics fear will deplete local homeowners’ wells, lower the Bellamy and Oyster rivers and drain wetlands.

“They are people who want to bully their way in and take our water,” said Barrington resident Denise Hart, a board member of the citizens group Save Our Groundwater. “This water is our lives, our community and our public health.”

Opposition in Wisconsin forced Nestle to abandon plans by its Perrier subsidiary to build a $100-million bottling plant east of Wisconsin Dells. Residents sued Perrier and the state for failing to properly evaluate the environmental impact of pumping up to 500 gallons per minute from wells near a spring. They argued the bottling operation could deplete a local aquifer used by the community.

In Michigan, about 200 miles northwest of Detroit, residents are engaged in a legal dispute against Nestle Waters North America Inc. over groundwater pumping that a court said might reduce flows into a local lake.

Last September, the City Council in Napa, the heart of Northern California’s wine country, rejected Crystal Geyser’s application to tap into the city’s aquifer to bottle mineral water. The mayor and others worried about the effects on the city’s groundwater supply and the industry’s contribution to global warming.

“These cases pop up in these small communities, and it takes awhile to realize this is a national trend,” said Noah D. Hall, an assistant law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit who specializes in water law.

California is home to 40% of the nation’s 300 water-bottling operations, according to statistics by the California Department of Public Health and the Beverage Marketing Corp.

The conflicts between bottlers and local communities nationwide are partly a reaction to Americans’ conflicted relationship with bottled water.

Americans drink more bottled water than milk, fruit juice, beer and wine. In 2001, bottled water was at the bottom of that list, according to the Beverage Marketing Corp.

Soda remains the most popular purchased drink, but the demand for bottled water is growing by 8% a year, pushing water bottling into a $10.8-billion-a-year industry nationwide.

To keep pace with that growth, corporate giants such as Nestle, Coca-Cola Co. and Crystal Geyser must look for new sources, which is leading them into areas where they face more and more conflict.

In McCloud, the Swiss company Nestle is seeking to build the country’s largest bottling plant, which will tap three of the natural springs on the flanks of 14,162-foot Mt. Shasta and bottle as much as 521 million gallons a year, enough water to supply 1,600 households.

The company promises 240 jobs and annual payments of $250,000 to $350,000, in addition to a charge based on how much water it pumps out. It says its operations will have no effect on the water supply for the town, which uses about 10% of the springs’ water.

Nevertheless, the proposal has raised concern among some residents, environmentalists, fishermen and scientists who say not enough study has been done on Nestle’s proposal.

Debra Anderson, a real estate agent who sits on the McCloud Watershed Council, questions the wisdom of selling such a crucial resource to a private company.

“There’s a growing concern of water-bottling plants throughout the country, and California has so many problems right now with their water throughout the state,” she said. “I think McCloud has to take a step back and look at the resources they have.”

McCloud sits just east of Interstate 5 in the shadow of Mt. Shasta, the second-tallest peak in the Cascade Range, and the feature that dominates the local landscape.

The region, with forests stretching in every direction, is crisscrossed with renowned trout streams. Its rivers feed the Sacramento River, the main artery of a massive state water system that is struggling to supply the nation’s richest agricultural fields and California’s ever-growing population, now approaching 38 million.

The dozens of springs breaking through the crust of Shasta’s lower reaches are so pure that residents drink directly from them, filling bottles to take home. Coca-Cola and Crystal Geyser already run bottling operations nearby.

In 2003, sensing the demise of California Cedar Products, the region’s main private employer, McCloud’s elected board approached Nestle, whose brands include Arrowhead, Poland Springs and Ozarka.

The company’s take would be an estimated 16% of what typically flows from the springs. But it’s not clear how the streams below would react to that kind of diversion. Some could become slower or warmer, affecting habitat for the trout that are prized by fishermen.

“Some of us are skeptical that there hasn’t been any real analysis,” said Peter B. Moyle, a biologist with UC Davis, who is beginning to study Mt. Shasta’s springs. “These are small streams. Individually, they don’t count for much, but it’s always the cumulative effect you worry about.”

In a concession, Nestle scaled back its initial proposal to pump groundwater in addition to the 521 million gallons it planned to drain from the area’s three springs. It was a strategic move by Nestle to win more community support and avoid future lawsuits like the one it continues to battle in Michigan.

Last year Nestle survived a challenge before the California Supreme Court in a lawsuit arguing that McCloud had exceeded its authority to broker a contract before the project went through the proper environmental reviews. Those reviews are still being performed by Siskiyou County. The approval process could take several more years.

Preliminary reviews have shown that Nestle’s plant, including construction of its pipelines and the water pumping, would have minimal environmental effect.

“We’re all working to the same goal, sustainability and protection of the environment,” said Nestle’s Northern California natural resource manager, David Palais. “We’re not going to come in and invest money and deplete the resource.”

In town, several residents and community leaders are frustrated the plant isn’t built yet. They believe McCloud has plenty of water to spare.

At the tanks where the city collects its spring water, a deafening 4,200 gallons a minute rushes out of a tank and back into the ground.

The rest of town is far quieter. Few children play in streets that see little traffic, the McCloud Soda Shoppe & Cafe, the bookstore and the general store are closed by 5:30 p.m., and visitors searching for an evening meal are out of luck on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The only eatery open on those nights is the bar at the local Veterans of Foreign Wars hall.

Randy Prinz, 52, says he might support the bottling operation if the town renegotiated its contract with Nestle to get more money. His grandparents settled in McCloud at the height of the timber industry, and he has watched it go from boom to bust.

“Now all you have is your memories and your house,” he said. “And no job.”